The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion 9781641894876, 9781641894883

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EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH Executive Editor Adrienne Williams Boyarin, University of Victoria

Editorial Board

Dorothy Kim, Brandeis University Iain Macleod Higgins, University of Victoria Stephanie J. Lahey, University of Victoria

Advisory Board

Anya Adair, Hong Kong University Jonathan Adams, Uppsala University Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Siobhain Bly Calkin, Carleton University Christopher Cannon, Johns Hopkins University Susanna Fein, Kent State University Helen Fulton, University of Bristol Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, University of Notre Dame Sharon Kinoshita, University of California Santa Cruz Scott Kleinman, California State University, Northridge

Erik Kwakkel, University of British Columbia, iSchool Adam Miyashiro, Stockton University Haruko Momma, New York University Ruth Nisse, Wesleyan University Delbert Russell, University of Waterloo Pinchas Roth, Bar-Ilan University Robert Rouse, University of British Columbia Elaine Treharne, Stanford University Diane Watt, University of Surrey

The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion Edited by

Michelle M. Sauer and

Jenny C. Bledsoe

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library © 2021, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

Bodies, Objects, and the Significance of Things in Early Middle English Reclusion: An Introduction MICHELLE M. SAUER and JENNY C. BLEDSOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Clothing and Female Reclusion in The Life of Mary of Egypt and The Life of Christina of Markyate ANNA MCKAY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Materiality, Documentary Authority, and the Circulation of the Katherine Group JENNY C. BLEDSOE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Framing Materiality: Relic Discourse and Medieval English Anchoritism MICHELLE M. SAUER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Relics and the Recluse’s Touch in Goscelin’s Miracles of St. Edmund SOPHIE SAWICKA-SYKES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Mary, Silence, and the Fictions of Power in Ancrene Wisse 2.269–481 JOSHUA S. EASTERLING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

The Anchoritic Body at Prayer in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius ALICIA SMITH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Stupor in John of Gaddesden’s Rosa medicinae LAURA GODFREY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

The Material of Vernacular English Devotion: Temptation and Sweetness in Ancrene Wisse and Richard Rolle’s Form of Living JENNIFER N. BROWN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 The Archaeological Context of an Anchorite Cell at Ruyton, Shropshire VICTORIA YUSKAITIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 4.1. Thomas à Becket casket reliquary (ca. 1190–1200), Musée de Cluny, CL.23296, oblique view. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Figure 4.2. Casket-shaped anchorhold at St. Michael and All Angels in Hartlip, Kent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Figure 10.1. The anchorite squint at Ruyton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Figure 10.2. The external recess at Ruyton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Figure 10.3. The dividing line indicating a chancel extension at Ruyton. . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Figure 10.4. The blocked-in early piscina directly across from the squint. . . . . . . . . . 133 Figure 10.5. The L-shaped raised vault, following the line of the chancel extension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

BODIES, OBJECTS, AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THINGS IN EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH RECLUSION: AN INTRODUCTION MICHELLE M. SAUER and JENNY C. BLEDSOE*

“[A] course to the visible causes is prepared for human intelligence and inquiry, as if in its word, by ascending in sequence to the invisible things of God that are clearly seen, being understood through those visible things that were made [Romans 1:20].” In his thirteenth-century commentary on Ecclesiasticus 43:1–5, Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln (ca. 1168–1253) proclaims the inherent power of visible things in a world created by the (largely) invisible divine. Deftly combining medieval science, especially the concepts of optics and perspectiva, classical Aristotelian philosophy, and mystical ideals, Grosseteste develops a vocabulary to illustrate how and why this is an important and necessary step in achieving true spiritual ascendance. Therefore, we know that things, created cultural objects, have long held a central place in Christianity as a way of making the immaterial material. Thus, it was about a decade ago when the medieval “materialist moment” kicked off to a rousing start, with initial forays combining art, art history, archaeology, literature, and history.1 Yet, a great deal remains to be explored. This volume will focus on one area that has, somewhat surprisingly, not been the focus of many such studies—medieval Christian reclusion, such as anchoritism and eremitism. This is not to say there has been nothing said on these matters;2 rather, there remains room for *  We want to acknowledge the people who have helped us put this volume together. The editorial team of Early Middle English and Arc Humanities Press deserve thanks for flexibility during the process, especially in light of the COVID-19 crisis, as well as for their helpful comments and suggestions. Our contributors have worked hard to provide a range of excellent essays on a topic near to our hearts and minds. Kyle Moore, an MA student at the University of North Dakota, provided invaluable assistance with formatting and proofreading. Michelle would also like to thank her co-editor, Jenny, for being a great partner and sharp reader. Jenny would like to thank Michelle for welcoming her to the field of anchoritic studies years ago, and for inspiring her to think more deeply about weird medieval things.

1  See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011); Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Stories of Stone,” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 1, no. 1–2 (2010): 56–63 and Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu–Muslim” Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary, ed., Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” Exemplaria, 22, no. 2 (2010): 99–118; and Jonathan Wilcox, ed., Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 23 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).

2  See, for example, Catherine Innes-Parker, “Reading and Devotional Practice: The Wooing Group Prayers of British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. xiv,” Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts

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the kinds of explorations presented here. The ideas explored range from the anticipated material examinations involving stones, bones, architecture, and manuscripts to the more unconventional addressing vision, vocabulary, and movement. Putting the object at the centre of various analyses offers new perspectives on religion, culture, the sacred, and the secular—and in this case, the reclusive. Objects serve as symbols of power and prestige; as markers of identity, both public and private; and as traces of exchange between medieval individuals. And the studies of these things—things made by people—and examinations of the ways those things inhabit and act upon the world bring new depth to existing historical narratives. Discovering what we can about the production, circulation, reception, context, and materiality of artifacts leads us to revelations about the religious, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual history of the medieval world. Although once the province of only art, archaeology, anthropology, and other visually and materially focused disciplines, the centrality of materiality to literature, literary culture, and history now illuminates our understanding of the early and high Middle Ages. How do objects and bodies interact and constitute devotional practices? Ian Hodder clarifies that objects are stable and isolated, while things exist only in context: “distinct objects” and “connected things.”3 Thus, one (objects) is dependent upon an ideal while the other is grounded in the practical. Within medieval religious literature, the idea of materiality and metaphors about it are central to anchoritic experience. But “objects,” seemingly “static” materiality, including physical spaces, shape literary and religious expressions even while they are not the contextualized

and Traditions, ed. Catherine Innes-Parker and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 137–49; Roberta Gilchrist and Marilyn Oliva, Religious Women in Medieval East Anglia (Norwich: Centre of East Anglian Studies, University of East Anglia, 1993); Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994); Liz Herbert McAvoy, “Gendered Strategies of Time and Memory in the Writing of Julian of Norwich and the Recluse of Winchester,” in Reconsidering Gender, Time, and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Roberta Magnani (Cambridge: Brewer, 2015), 95–110; and Michelle M. Sauer, “Architecture of Desire: Mediating the Female Gaze in the Medieval English Anchorhold,” Gender & History 25, no. 3 (2013): 541–60. To some extent as well, the most fundamental resources on medieval English anchoritism also provide a connection with materiality. See Rotha Mary Clay, Hermits and Anchorites of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1914) and Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Both spend time discussing material circumstances and contexts of the profession.

3  Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Chi­ chester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 10. Hodder builds on Thing Theory, developed by literary theorist Bill Brown in the late 1990s. Brown relies on Heidegger’s distinction in Being and Time between what is “ready-to-hand” and what is “present-at-hand” to distinguish objects from things—objects are what we do not readily pay attention to, whereas things are dependent upon our use and interaction. Thing Theory entered wide usage after Brown wrote an introduction to a special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled “Things” (vol. 28, 2001) and published the 2003 book A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also the translation of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927) in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM, 1962).



INTRODUCTION

3

“things” of devotion such as books, beads, and candles. Objects and things might be non-corporeal—yet an extension of the body—as well. The idea of removing the object, whatever that might mean, from materiality and turning instead to a type of materiality that encompasses embodiment is not without precedent. Daniel Miller introduced what he calls “sapient materiality” in his collection entitled simply Materiality.4 In sapient materiality, which has its roots in humanity’s increasing reliance upon the digital realm made of bits and code, both consciousness and cognition are part of the specifics of materiality rather than being defined in opposition to a material world. Thus, matter can be viewed as “an active force in the making of the world” and not just the product of such a force.5 That humans are part of active, living matter means sapient materiality defines embodiment and cognition as manifestations of materiality as a whole. Extending this concept even further, then, to religion seems natural—religion is fundamentally about the abstract and the immaterial, so developing new ideas about materiality can help unpack the relationship between human and divine, between subject and object, and between material and immaterial. Like the earlier Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (1995) by Colleen McDannell, Caroline Walker Bynum’s Christian Materiality (2011) examines the material objects of devotion that populated medieval Christian devotions, extending the purview beyond the laity to encompass intellectual and theological debates as well.6 For one thing, materiality as defined by Bynum centres on paradox. As the Middle Ages progressed, pre-Reformation Christianity became more and more concerned with tangible matter and ephemera as loci of the divine. However, the divine is also ineffable, and a parallel development of mysticism and interiority simultaneously upheld the intangible nature of religious experience. So when Bynum creates lists of things, “relics […] contact and effluvial relics […] sacramentals […] the material of the Eucharist and other sacraments […] and Dauerwunder” as well as “devotional images—statues, winged altarpieces, prayer cards, stained glass, and so forth,”7 she also immediately acknowledges the categories as inherently permeable: “holy objects did not fall simply and easily into the categories I just listed: relic, contact relic, image, and so forth. Rather, they tended to be conflated.”8 And the paradox broadens: there is a fundamental conflict present in the conception of an omnipotent, omnipresent, and eternal deity acting through mundane objects made of wood and stone and bread that can wither, decay, and 4  Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). See especially “Materiality: An Introduction,” 1–50.

5  Sarah Pink, Elisenda Ardèvol, and Dèbora Lanzeni, “Digital Materiality,” in Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology, ed. Pink, Ardèvol, and Lanzeni (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 1–26 at 11.

6  Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 7  Bynum, Christian Materiality, 25–28.

8  Bynum, Christian Materiality, 29.

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rot. Thus, what Bynum develops is really a Christian ontology of matter. And Sara Ritchey builds on this general set of concepts, moving even further away from “just” objects, examining the way vowed religious responded to the materiality of the Incarnation.9 In particular, Ritchey posits “a God that entered matter, died in order to promise the salvation of matter, and continually reentered matter in the celebration of his promise” as “a God that could be discovered in matter, in holy matter.”10 Therefore the ontology of Christian matter is always focused on “re-creation,” that is the remaking of devotional images and Christological events through prayer and meditation, thereby recreating the divine in the world. In addition to the theological and devotional significance of matter, the late Middle Ages found writers and artists evaluating the status of matter as a way of querying the human–object and the human–animal divide. Rather than stereotyping medieval things as part of a “dark,” animistic past (in contrast to the light of the Renaissance), Kellie Robertson invites scholars to reconsider how authors, artists, and other medieval creators conceived of and shaped the “historically contingent line between the human and the non-human.”11 The rise of object-oriented ontology, a branch of postmodern critical theory, has led scholars to analyze objects through an explicitly non-anthropocentric lens. For example, Brigitte Buettner, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and other scholars have analyzed medieval objects as agents.12 An object-oriented approach to medieval literature allows scholars to consider “the kinds of object networks that these things gather to themselves and maintain and the myriad ways that objects shape human perceptions and knowledges rather than being merely shaped by them.”13 In the introduction to their 2014 special issue of Different Visions on “Active Objects,” Karen Eileen Overbey and Benjamin C. Tilghman explain their approach as one “that takes materiality as its starting point, rather than artists, patrons, or beholders, and which explores networks of things rather than power structures or social conditions or the relationship between word and image.”14 In a related approach but one more focused on human subjectivity, Sarah Kay sees the study of materiality as a way of blurring the 9  See Bynum, Christian Materiality, 33, for a discussion of how late medieval representations of the Incarnation are part of a larger discussion about matter and how Christ’s humanity functions as “a leading back of all creation to God” (16).

10  Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Chri­ stianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 23. 11  Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object,” Literature Compass 5, no. 6 (2008): 1060–80 at 1062. On the definition of the human in relation to the animal, see Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011).

12  Brigitte Buettner, “From Bones to Stones: Reflections on Jeweled Reliquaries,” in Reliquiare im Mittelalter, ed. Bruno Reudenbach and Gia Toussaint (Berlin: Akademie, 2011), 43–59; see Cohen, “Stories of Stone” and Stone. 13  Robertson, “Medieval Things,” 1075.

14  Karen Eileen Overbey and Benjamin C. Tilghman, “Active Objects: An Introduction,” Different Visions 4 (2014): 1–9 at 3.



INTRODUCTION

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human–animal divide and playing with a multiplicitous lens for reading medieval literature: “The pleasure of reading lies not in renouncing skin for some supposedly deeper meaning, nor in stripping the text back to the ‘meat,’ but rather in enjoying the potential mobility and contingency of skins that have been furnished for this purpose, and which the reader too can play with assuming.”15 Kay’s analysis does not remove the human from the equation as she imagines both medieval and modern reader responses. This collection seeks to connect traditional materialist approaches with some expanded analyses concerned with embodied aspects of religious experience, such as voice, prayer gestures, and medical states. New studies on voice in context suggest that voice, the central idea behind Joshua S. Easterling’s piece on Ancrene Wisse, is an essential aspect of embodiment and discourse. For instance, Laurie Stras writes: “for Adriana Cavarero’s embodied existence, the voice is the way the unique self makes her narrative heard to another unique self, ‘the corporeal communication of uniqueness.’”16 Stras goes on to explain that this relationship among the voice, the body, and identity emphasizes that vocal materiality is dependent upon how and when voice matters. For medieval devotional literature, mysticism in particular allows speech the luxury of excess, even in theological writings, and does this in ways that undo the coherence of embodied cohesion.17 As Easterling suggests, then, voice is fundamental to embodiment, which is a key to materiality in the context of religious expression, especially when assisted by technology. Studies of medical states and gestures of prayer reveal the intertwined nature of cognition, the body, and material objects—relevant to sapient materiality—as it is expressed within religious devotion. Within earlier medieval and early modern scholarship, New Historicism and Marxist theory inspired studies of individual objects and the material conditions of their production, centred on the human consumption of those objects. By combining historicism with critical theory, we can decentre the (imagined) human subject while also finding new ways to envision the exchanges that occurred between individual medieval people. As Robertson explains, social relations become visible 15  Sarah Kay, “Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading,” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 13–32. See also Kay, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

16  Laurie Stras, “The Artist’s Impression: Ethel Waters as Mimic,” in The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality, ed. Judith T. Zeitlin and Martha Feldman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 128–41 at 128. She cites Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 199. Cavarero writes in opposition to Roland Barthes’s idea of the grain, which sees the voice as “raw materiality” affected by nature, yet unshaped by language. See Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: HarperCollins, 1977), 179–89.

17  For more on this type of thought, see Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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through the exchange of gifts and other items: “that ubiquitous but vague entity known as ‘social relations’ is not constituted by the ‘social’ at all but by the material things that make the social visible.”18 The study of materiality illuminates how human society aligns with the buying, using, and disposing of commodities. Commodities are more than just objects; they are shifting assemblages of social relations, which take place and assume form and meaning in time and space. They are tied together via consumption. In turn, consumption itself represents a complex network of social relations and discourse, comprising interactions, relationships, encounters, and practices between people, places, and things. Such relations may form structures and institutions (for example, family or church), but they also operate at the level of the individual. People construct discourse through their actions and interpretations, but discourses also regulate social thought and action. Consumers are not passive entities; instead, they demonstrate agency when using skills to choose, purchase, create, interpret, or represent goods, and when engaging emotions, knowledges, and senses in consumption practices that constitute identities.19 Matter itself has been central to how scholars have conceived of and constructed historical periods: “the realm of phenomenal things has come to be the place where arguments about what counts as ‘modern’ have been made in recent years.”20 Similarly, Bynum notes that human conceptions of matter as alive and powerful have often been a focus of dated narratives that cast medieval people as credulous animists. Yet Bynum’s Christian Materiality does identify a significant conceptual and devotional shift related to matter in the late Middle Ages: “Matter was a more insistent and problematic locus of the sacred in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries than in the early medieval period.”21 Theological questions about the presence of the divine in matter emerged at the same time that reliquaries, Books of Hours, and other devotional objects proliferated, reaching new lay audiences as well as professional religious. Although studies of individual medieval objects are often synchronically focused, the growing number of studies on medieval and early modern materiality are making it possible to trace developments and changes in cultural conceptions of materiality across time. Our volume contributes to this conversation about materiality and periodization by focusing on a period of the English Middle Ages that has received new scholarly attention in recent decades. In the summer of 2018, the International Anchoritic Society held its triennial conference in Norwich, considered by many to be the epicentre of medieval English anchoritism. Not only is the locale represented by the most famous anchoress, Julian of Norwich (1343–after 1416), but also it was home to a large number of anchorites, hermits, monastic orders, and hospitals. The theme of that conference was “Reclusion and Materiality: Devotion and Contexts,” and many, although not all, 18  Robertson, “Medieval Things,” 1074.

19  For more on human consumption and its theoretical underpinnings, see David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, and Kate Housiaux, The Consumption Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). 20  Robertson, “Medieval Things,” 1063. 21  Bynum, Christian Materiality, 19.



INTRODUCTION

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of the essays collected in this volume had their origins in presentations at that conference. The desire then, as it is now, was to foreground the connection between the interaction of people and things, and to examine how the engagement of the senses with the tangible shaped medieval Christian devotional practice and understanding with a particular emphasis on vocational reclusion. Although the anchoritic vocation is an old one that can be dated back to St. Antony (251–356) and the Egyptian desert, it was seized upon with alacrity in England. While technically hermits and anchorites have separate vocations, with hermits being mobile and anchorites being stationary, we can group them together under the heading of reclusion. Ninth-century England witnessed an upswing in the number of solitaries, spurred on by the famous hermit saints Cuthbert (ca. 634–687) and Guthlac (ca. 673–714), both of whom established the eremitic model as a continuation of the desert model of St. Antony.22 Social, political, and economic upheaval around the Norman Conquest (1066) resulted in a downturn in reclusive vocations; however, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries once again witnessed an uptick. It is during this time when the most well-known English anchoritic works were composed: Ælred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum (Rule for a Recluse, ca. 1160–1162; Ælred, 1110/12–1167), Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses, thirteenth century), and Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd (The Wooing of Our Lord, thirteenth century). Ancrene Wisse is perhaps the most familiar English text about anchoritism. It was written ca. 1190–1220 in the West Midlands dialect dubbed the “AB Language” by J. R. R. Tolkien.23 The AB language or dialect is also used in the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, linking them all under the label the “Ancrene Wisse Group.” Ancrene Wisse is, essentially, a rule for anchoresses; however, it also contains allegorical narratives, Biblical allusions, and fanciful descriptions, all meant to instruct the anchoresses in how to best live their vocation. Ancrene Wisse is an excellent example of the varied linguistic tradition of the Early Middle English era. Including fragments, there are seventeen versions of the text still extant—four of these are in Latin, two are in French, and the rest are in Middle English. The text itself has been adapted a number of times for groups of varying sizes and genders, and even for the heretical Lollard sect. It also deftly combines the so-called Outer Rule with reflections on the Inner Rule. The Outer Rule includes details about how the cell should be structured; what the anchoress should eat, wear, do, and say; and how she should interact with the world. The Inner Rule, on the other hand, outlines daily devotions, provides scriptural foundations, and generally guides the spiritual life. Although primarily in the vernacular, the text clearly anticipates that its readers would be familiar with the Bible, with hagiography, and with Church teachings. Although there is some interwoven Latin, the quotations are provided alongside English

22  For a more extensive look at early anchoritism in England, see Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

23  J. R. R. Tolkien, “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 14 (1929): 104–26.

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translations. In short, Ancrene Wisse embodies intertextuality, shared vocabularies, and the combining of physicality with spirituality—all of the concepts most central to our volume. Unsurprisingly, every essay here includes at least some reference to this touchstone text for those reasons. It provides the foundational ideas for English reclusion not only in its own specific time, but also throughout the medieval period. It seems to us, not only because of the essays in this volume, but also by dint of content, that the materiality of anchoritism in medieval England, whether expressed through physical objects and ephemera, or via embodiment and the physicality of self, in many ways is deeply connected to Ancrene Wisse. In content, it amply demonstrates this connection. The very structure reflects materiality: the “Outer Rule,” focusing on the physical acts of anchoritic living, bookends the “Inner Rule,” which reflects spiritual preparation and exercises. Both, however, rely on material objects: the cell itself, the relics in the altar(s), the windows, the crucifixes, and so forth. And both rely on embodiment and voice: the repetitive praying, the genuflections, the singing of psalms and sharing of advice, the visions of Christ, and similar experiences. Thus, we see a singular and natural connection to this text woven throughout each of the essays contained in the volume. This was an unintended side effect of our shared work; the spontaneous nature of this overlap, however, makes the significance of the correlation that much greater. Our volume, then, addresses how material objects, spaces of reclusion, and anchoritic bodies interact. Each of the longer essays picks up on the larger themes of the volume as a whole. They demonstrate extended readings of particular aspects of materiality: embodied voice and prayer, manuscript tradition and circulation, and relics and touch. As noted in Joshua S. Easterling’s and Sophie SawickaSykes’s essays, human senses, so carnal and base, shape the spiritual identity of the woman within the cell. Alicia Smith considers embodied prayer and the enactment of a new type of materiality rooted in gestures and words. Jenny C. Bledsoe’s piece explicitly links the material of writing, the parchment and skin, to the body of the anchoress, while Michelle M. Sauer’s essay reminds us that the anchoritic cell and the anchoritic body not only inhabit the same space but also merge into a singular entity. Her essay and Anna McKay’s more directly address “traditional” material contexts, but each also incorporates an aspect of spiritual embodiment as well. McKay, for example, suggests that clothing and other material goods lead to greater devotion in part by supplying something to reject. Rounding out the volume are case studies that demonstrate specific applications of what has been more broadly addressed in theory. In other words, we see this volume as a concerted whole, working together towards shifting the definition of materiality from a reliance strictly on “things” without to including “things” within. If we see materiality as both object and embodiment, then the case studies put that into action, extending the study of medieval literature and religion to adjacent fields and disciplines, including book history, medicine, and archaeology. In each case study, we see the merger of Christian principles, anchoritic ideals, and material conditions. Jennifer N. Brown’s and Laura Godfrey’s essays provide vocabulary to investigate this overlap of body and space. Brown closely investigates the tension between Latin and



INTRODUCTION

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the vernacular English in shaping affective response, showing how medieval English anchoritic writers deploy a shared vocabulary variably—using “sweetness” in both fleshly and spiritual terms. This language of devotion is fundamentally reliant upon the material condition of the manuscript itself, but also results in a different “lived experience,” depending upon the choice of expression and the force behind the words. Godfrey, on the other hand, examines the effect of a singular aspect of embodied response—stupor—highlighting the medical aspects behind a devotional experience, merging the perceived and the lived into an expression of prayer. The short piece by Victoria Yuskaitis represents a more so-called traditional material approach, yet it, too, points to the explicit connections among the literary, the spiritual, and the real. Taking on a singular unique case study of an in situ anchoritic cell, Yuskaitis moves beyond a recitation of details, or even a catalogue of characteristics, into an investigation of the complete archaeological context, showing “how the anchorite would have interacted with the rest of the church building—and, by extension, the church community—through the cell.” The intimate details of the cell’s inner workings provide a fuller image of the material conditions of the lived anchoritic experience, even suggesting timing and style of prayer. All three scholars discuss authority and tradition; all three essays use one example—a textual tradition or a physical space—to explore larger trends within medieval English anchoritism and materiality. The variety of texts explored in the volume easily illustrates the corresponding variety of languages and types of literature found within Early Middle English society. In thirteenth-century Britain, literary languages included English, French, Hebrew, Irish, Latin, and Welsh. The six aforementioned languages were addressed in keynotes at the 2016 “Making Early Middle English” conference, highlighting the essentially multilingual nature of the period.24 Analyzing anchoritic works in the context of a multilingual literary culture, our volume’s authors explore works originally composed in Latin and Middle English, as well as later Middle English translations and expansions of earlier anchoritic works. There is an undeniable association between reclusion and the English language during this period. Presenting Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group as the “bridge” between Old English and the fourteenth-century explosion of Middle English literature, J. R. R. Tolkien and R. W. Chambers emphasized the Englishness of the texts as a testament to the strength of English literature in the face of invading French works.25 As Bella Millett puts it, “Tolkien and Chambers attached a high value to the ‘AB group’ largely because they saw it as a symbol of native English resistance to an alien culture.”26 In 24  “Keynotes,” Making Early Middle English: An International Conference on English Literature and Its Contexts, ca. 1100–1350, University of Victoria, accessed July 29, 2020, https://hcmc.uvic.ca/ makingEME/keynotes.html. Several of these were published in Early Middle English, 1, no. 1 (2019).

25  R. W. Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, EETS o.s. 191A (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932; repr. 1963), clxxiii.

26  Bella Millett, “Hali Meiðhad, Sawles Warde, and the Continuity of English Prose,” in Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson, ed. Eric Gerald Stanley and Douglas Gray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100–14 at 100.

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this respect, the emphasis on the English language results partially from past scholars’ nationalism, yet the investment in English was not only a twentieth-century one. Dorothy Kim has argued that the use of English in the Katherine Group was a “politicized” choice and “a particular kind of devotional innovation” as a “gendered form of crusader propaganda.”27 During a time of historical, religious, linguistic, and social transition, lay literacy increased, resulting in greater demand for books, particularly in vernacular languages. In our volume, Jennifer Brown’s short essay shows that this preference for the English language—due to its association with a famous recluse—extends into the Early Modern period, as small English excerpts from Richard Rolle’s Form of Living (ca. 1348; Rolle, ca. 1300–1349) are maintained by the continental compilers of the Speculum spiritualium (The Spiritual Mirror, ca. 1400–1430). Besides Ancrene Wisse, the essays address a variety of anchoritic or anchoriticadjacent texts. This includes a range of works encompassing guidance literature, hagiographies, miracle narratives, medical discourse, and mystic prose, and spanning in date from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. These texts are both didactic and imaginative, and all make explicit the place of the material reality in the reclusive, contemplative life. For instance, Ælred’s Rule for a Recluse, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius (Book of Consolation, ca. 1080–1082), and Rolle’s Form of Living, like Ancrene Wisse, combine instruction on the external trappings and practices of anchoritism with inner devotions and prayer. From Northumberland, Ælred, abbot of the Cistercian foundation at Rievaulx, supposedly wrote his Rule for his sister, but critics disagree about her existence. Ælred’s Rule, which is extant in both Latin and Middle English, serves as the model for many later works. The Rule establishes a “foundation” (institutione) for the anchoress’s life, including external regulations while not neglecting interiority, whereas Goscelin’s Liber ignores formal rules and focuses its advice on reading material and spiritual exercises. Alicia Smith’s essay provides an illustrative example of this merger of internal and external in the reclusive life with her examination of Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius. The Liber is an anchoritic guide for the new anchoress Eve of Wilton (ca. 1058–ca. 1125), but it is also an exhortation to reclusive spiritual development as well as a panacea to the lovelorn Goscelin. Goscelin (ca. 1035–ca. 1107), Flemish by birth, was a Benedictine monk of Saint-Bertin (Saint-Omer) who first came to England to work for Hermann, bishop of Ramsbury in Wiltshire (d. 1078), in the early 1060s.28 Goscelin travelled to many English religious foundations, including Ely, Barking, and Saint Augustine’s, Canterbury, and composed hagiographical and liturgical works about numerous English saints. Composed for Eve, the Liber is writ27  Dorothy Kim, “Rewriting Liminal Geographies: Crusader Sermons, the Katherine Group, and the Scribe of MS Bodley 34,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 42, no. 1 (2016): 56–78 at 57, 73, 59; see also 74.

28  Frank Barlow, “Goscelin (b. ca. 1035, d. in or after 1007),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed January 22, 2021, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/11105.



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ten in Latin, but it nevertheless reflects the complex linguistic and cultural context of Anglo-Norman England. In looking at the Liber as a physical exercise in prayer as well as a spiritual one, Smith draws on Lacoste’s definition of liturgy as the entire embodied and spiritual encounter between humans and God, which in turn directs her analysis of how prayer emerges from “the body in its space.” Smith ultimately argues that the only way to truly understand anchoritic practitioners is to comprehend their penitential, transformed bodies, which are prefigured through performative prayer. Whereas the early texts, like the Liber, rely on affective spirituality as their main approach to piety, and were composed originally in Latin, later texts, like Rolle’s, are more practical in nature and were mostly composed in the vernacular. As the demand for vernacular literature grew, the earlier texts were often adapted or translated. Ancrene Wisse’s French, Lollard, and other versions are mentioned above, and the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries witnessed two Middle English versions of Ælred’s text as well. In a frequently mentioned example of intertextuality among the Early Middle English anchoritic works, the author of Ancrene Wisse references the audience’s access to saints’ lives, specifically “ower Englische boc of Seinte Margarete” (your English book about Saint Margaret).29 Hagiographies provide a rich resource for exploring materiality in the reclusive life. In the course of constructing a holy biography, these legends often illustrate a life with anchoritic qualities lived outside a cell, as well as material conditions, such as the trappings of wealth and instruments of torture. In addition to the correspondences between physical objects and spaces, such as the saint’s prison cell and the anchorite’s enclosure, virgin martyr hagiographies emphasize the power of prayer and the strength of virginity. These performative works invite readers to access the narrative structure as part of the scene, fully engaging the senses, especially touch. Bynum, for instance, describes how threedimensionality “impel[s] viewers to experience greater tactility as they penetrated to deeper soteriological significance,” and while she was particularly referencing objects, as a number of essays in the collection demonstrate, this drive towards salvation manifests through multiple materialities.30 The essays collected here explore the Life of Mary of Egypt (eighth century, circulated in Britain pre-Conquest), the Life of Christina of Markyate (twelfth century), Goscelin’s Miracles of St. Edmund (ca. 1100), and the thirteenth-century narratives of virgin martyrs found in the Katherine Group—Seinte Katerine (The Life of St. Katherine), Seinte Iuliene (The Life of St. Juliana), and Seinte Margarete (The Life of St. Margaret). Mary of Egypt (344–421) is considered one of the Desert Harlots, a reformed prostitute who retreated into the desert leaving behind her clothes and her sins in order to live a life of extreme ascetic discipline as a way of reassert-

29  Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–2006), 4.55.931–32, at vol. 1, p. 93; translation from Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), 93. 30  Bynum, Christian Materiality, 24.

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ing control over her body and purifying her soul. Anna McKay’s essay reads Mary’s relationship with clothing as a marker of formative moments in her choice to live a reclusive life. For example, McKay sees Mary gaining autonomy as she dons Zosimus’s cloak which represents his priestly authority. McKay also addresses the Life of Christina of Markyate, a hagiography concerned with a cross-dressing virgin who sought escape from the world and the marriage her parents had arranged for her. Like Mary of Egypt, Christina (1096/98–ca. 1155) rejects secular life for a life of religious seclusion. McKay demonstrates that Christina’s hagiography shows how the saint resists the presentation of her body as a marriageable commodity and instead chooses a life of freedom in religious seclusion through clothing. The legends McKay studies tell the stories of reclusive women, whereas the saints’ lives of the Katherine Group represent a collection of reading materials designed for and circulating among anchorites and the laity. The Katherine Group hagiographies are touched on by Jenny C. Bledsoe, who shows how metaphors related to the saint’s flesh and the animal skin of the manuscript page are used to define and bolster the documentary authority of vernacular texts. Hagiographies and anchoritic works document their authenticity through association with a body—of the dead saint and of the living-dead anchorite. The saints’ lives provide basic theological instruction which the anchoress could utilize in her role as a teacher to her servants and mediator between clerical and lay circles. Bledsoe explores codicological and literary evidence that demonstrates the existence of an ephemeral and piecemeal anchoritic–lay literary culture first posited by Catherine Innes-Parker. As Bledsoe describes a literary world of booklets, scraps, and memorial transmission, Joshua S. Easterling’s essay addresses how anchorites interacted with their communities in light of a “complex culture of visitation.” Easterling shows how the author of Ancrene Wisse draws upon and reworks Bernard of Clairvaux’s account of the Annunciation in order to underscore the power of the anchoress’s limited speech and frequent silence as part of a “vibrantly oral culture […] centred on the anchorhold” (Bernard, 1090–1153). In particular, he emphasizes the possible power of the imitatio clerici; anchoresses had the potential to guide the salvation of their fellow Christians, a somewhat dangerous position for a woman to occupy. Thus, both Bledsoe’s and Easterling’s essays explore how the anchorite functions, practically and metaphorically, within broader literary and religious cultures—both written and oral—of the Early Middle English period. Several of the texts addressed by our authors are anchoritic-adjacent. By that we mean that most are collected in manuscripts with anchoritic works, written by authors concerned with anchoritic topics, or address topics, especially mysticism and prayer, that relate to the anchoritic vocation. For instance, Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole, wrote The Form of Living for Margaret Kirkby, an anchoress (ca. 1322–1391/94). He himself lived as a hermit for many years, although he was never as strictly enclosed as an anchorite. One of his more well-known works, Incendium amoris (The Fire of Love, after 1340), composed in Latin but translated into the vernacular, explicitly upholds the solitary life as the ideal life, although it is also preoccupied with mysticism and contemplation in general. Similarly, Jan van Ruus-



INTRODUCTION

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broec’s De calculo31 (The Sparkling Stone, ca. 1340; van Ruusbroec 1293/94–1381) emphasizes the importance and superiority of the contemplative life, although it is predominantly concerned with mysticism. Each of these texts avoids any discussion of anchoritic “outer rules,” but their contents are consistent with the contents of various “inner rules.” The focus on merging with Christ is especially congruent with anchoritic ideals, a vocation not only dedicated to contemplation and discipline, but also one that enjoyed a close, even spousal, relationship with Christ. The only text seemingly not of this mystical ilk is John of Gaddesden’s Rosa medicinæ (Rose of Medicine, ca. 1313–1320; John, fl. 1305–1348), an early fourteenth-century medical treatise. Addressing the intersection between medical language and devotional experience, Laura Godfrey deftly explains the Rosa’s relevance in her essay: “Taking medieval medical stupor as a case study, we might understand how religious writers—whether male authors of anchoritic guides and vitæ of anchoresses or anchorites themselves—used medical discourse to describe and make sense of powerful and complex somatic and cognitive experiences.” Indeed, the mystic texts also aid in this development of a larger anchoritic picture, although spiritually rather than physically. Yet as so many of our authors point out, the physical is an inescapable part of a vocation that depends on extreme enclosure as its defining characteristic. And paradoxically, anchorites are withdrawn from the world even as they continue to influence it greatly. Relics, in turn, invoke anchorites and boundary crossing (between life and death, clerical and lay, absence and presence, etc.), emphasize the importance of the physical senses (especially touch, but also sight and sound) even while disavowing them, and demonstrate community interaction. By exploring anchoritic rules, lapidaries, and related works, Michelle M. Sauer posits that not only were anchorites important to the relic-centred discourse of medieval devotion, but also they were, in a sense, relics themselves. If relics serve as living reminders of a saintly body removed from earth yet alive in faith and spirit, a fragment of life after death, then anchorites who inhabit a liminal existence between life and death might be classified as such. Sauer borrows from Robyn Malo’s concept of relic discourse, the representation of the whole through the fragment and the description of the reliquary or exterior, to demonstrate how anchorites and anchoritic literature occupy a similar space in community importance and devotion. Thus, anchorites as relics come to life in Sauer’s essay through relic discourse, not as actual material objects. While the anchorhold encloses and hides the anchorite from view, relic discourse allows both medieval and modern viewers to envision the anchoress in her space. This desire to see inside, to touch the physical signs of holiness, inspires Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s commentary on the pious and impious touches of devotees visiting the relics of St. Edmund. Sophie Sawicka-Sykes concentrates on touch as a means of transforming the quotidian into the inspirational, modelled through the example of a female recluse who served St. Edmund by caring for his relics as a humble ser-

31  In the original manuscript, the work is erroneously titled “calculo” (meaning “counter” or “counting”), instead of “calculus” (meaning “pebble”).

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MICHELLE M. SAUER AND JENNY C. BLEDSOE

vant. Seitha lived near Bury St. Edmunds in the 1090s, and in his miracle collection, Goscelin contrasts the “purity of [Seitha’s] touch” with the probing touches of male clerics who doubt and seek to verify the authenticity of the relics.

Conclusion

In their exploration of reclusion and materiality, the essays collected here address a series of overlapping themes, including the importance of touch, the qualities of proof, the limits of religious authority, and the role of the senses. Objects, metaphorical and real, embodied and spiritual, populate the pages. All of these are permeable categories, with flexible and porous boundaries, demonstrating the conflation of ideas, concepts, and manifestations in medieval materiality. In fact, the permeability of these categories demonstrates how materiality can reshape our approach to medieval texts. It leaves room for directions for future study, including the application of material analysis to previously unstudied objects, spaces, and literary artifacts. Comparative studies of Celtic texts would be a fruitful pursuit for future scholarship on materiality and Early Middle English reclusion. Across the Irish Sea, the early thirteenth-century Dublin Rule32 offers an example contemporaneous to Ancrene Wisse, and there are numerous opportunities for cross-cultural hagiographical study, including the Middle Welsh lives of Katherine and Margaret written soon after the composition of the English Katherine Group. Outside of the Early Middle English context, there is enormous potential to expand the study of reclusion and materiality to different places and periods, including the traditions of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and other Christian anchorites across Europe, as well as hermits and recluses in other places and religions of the medieval world.

32  See Colmán Ó� Clabaigh osb, “Anchorites in Late Medieval Ireland,” in Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 153–77, especially 169–70 on the Dublin Rule.



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Jenny C. Bledsoe received her PhD in English from Emory University and is an Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Her research on Early Middle English, religious literature, and manuscript studies has appeared in New Medieval Literatures, the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Medieval Sermon Studies, Notes & Queries, and Pedagogy.

Michelle M. Sauer is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota. She specializes in Middle English language and literature, focusing on reclusion, monasticism, hagiography, and queer/gender theory. Her publications include numerous articles and the books Celebrating St. Albert and His Rule: Rules, Devotion, Orthodoxy, and Dissent (2018, with Kevin Alban), Gender in Medieval Culture (2015), and The Lesbian Premodern (2011, with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney), among others.

CLOTHING AND FEMALE RECLUSION IN THE LIFE OF MARY OF EGYPT AND THE LIFE OF CHRISTINA OF MARKYATE ANNA MCKAY

In recent years, the work of scholars such as E. Jane Burns, Kathryn Rudy, and Barbara Baert has firmly established material culture, specifically the representation of textiles, as a means by which to explore the often-silenced experiences of women in medieval literature.1 We have begun to recognize textiles as textual, considering the fabrics worked and produced by literary women as bearers of alternate histories and stories suppressed by the patriarchal culture of the written word. Developing this alternate literacy, reading through fabric, offers a particularly apt means of uncovering the history of female reclusion in the Christian church of the Middle Ages, specifically in hagiographical writing. Gail Ashton has astutely argued that female hagiography traditionally written by men can be defined as what Hélène Cixous calls “marked writing,” literature “run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy.”2 As Ashton explains, “female hagiographical texts are inherently fissured and unstable texts […] what is contained in them is a doubled discourse, the ‘heard’ and dominant, intended one—masculine—and a feminine voice that reveals itself differently that puts pressure on the masculine generic one, and is as much a part of the vitae as that other.”3 Textiles and clothwork in medieval narratives offer a means by which the feminine can speak, a means by which it can reveal itself despite the impositions of masculine authorship. This essay considers the ways in which female recluses speak through textiles in two hagiographical texts, Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate, exploring clothing as an important means by which the female recluse conceptualizes and defines the terms of her seclusion. The lives of the harlot turned Desert Mother and the virtuous Bride of Christ fleeing arranged marriage speak to one another, respectively delineating the predominantly patriarchal, and at-times dangerous, religious and secular values inherent in sartorial culture for women who seek to transcend the earthly realm. 1  E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002) is a ground-breaking study of the hermeneutical value of clothwork in French romance. Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert’s joint edition of the excellent collection Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007) has significantly advanced the study of textiles, particularly in religious and devotional writing. 2  Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen; Paula Cohen, Signs, 1, no. 4. (1976): 875–93 at 879.

3  Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint (New York: Routledge, 2000), 4.

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Anna McKay

Mary of Egypt (344–421) is known as perhaps the most famous of the “Desert Mothers,” the female recluses of the early Christian period who sought out the solitary life practiced by the Desert Fathers. The earliest version of her life is the Greek account given by Sophronius (560–638) in the seventh century, but the version I have chosen to focus on here is the eighth-century Latin Life written by Paul the Deacon (d. 799). As Jane Stevenson explains in her comprehensive exploration of the Latin text, this version of the Life is the only account known to have circulated in the British Isles before the Norman Conquest.4 Indeed, as Stevenson attests, manuscript evidence suggests that Mary’s story was well-known in England. We are aware of one tenth-century continental manuscript in circulation in England pre-Conquest, two copies made during the eleventh century, three Anglo-Norman treatments of the story, and the verse paraphrase of the life produced by Hildebert of Lavardin (ca. 1055–1133).5 As a reformed harlot living a life of extreme seclusion in the desert, Mary provided the quintessential model of reclusion for medieval women seeking anchoritic life during the Middle Ages, and the parallels between her Life and that of Christina of Markyate (1096/98–ca. 1155), particularly with respect to their relationship with clothwork, attest this influence. With the rise of anchoritic scholarship in recent years, The Life of Christina of Markyate has garnered increasing attention as a text reflective of the enormous social and cultural changes in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest.6 What these studies have highlighted is that the Life sits at the intersection of secular political and religious concerns in the twelfth century. Material culture, particularly sartorial culture, is central to the text’s negotiation of the conflict between these spheres for the female recluse. By aligning Christina’s tale with The Life of Mary of Egypt as a key anchoritic text, we can more clearly see the ways in which cloth is central to the representation and understanding of the reclusive life as a state of religious independence, of freedom from the worldly values and patriarchal control signified by clothing. In comparing these two lives, however, I am quite aware that I am drawing parallels between a saint commonly recognized as fictional and a historically proven figure. Indeed, in her study Holy Women of Twelfth Century England, Sharon K. Elkins has argued strenuously against the close comparison of these lives on these very terms: 4  Jane Stevenson, “The Holy Sinner: The Life of Mary of Egypt,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Blackrock: Four Courts, 1996), 42. 5  Stevenson, “The Holy Sinner,” 42.

6  Henrietta Leyser frames her discussion of the text within the context of early English resistance to the Conquest in “Christina of Markyate: The Introduction,” in Christina of Markyate: A TwelfthCentury Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–2. Stephanie Hollis and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne discuss its significance in relation to the changes to female property inheritance which came with the Normans in “St. Albans and Women’s Monasticism: Lives and Their Foundations in Christina’s World,” in Christina of Markyate, ed. Fanous and Leyser, 40. R. I. Moore explores the text’s negotiation of ecclesiastical politics in “Ranulf Flamberd and Christina of Markyate,” in Christina of Markyate, ed. Fanous and Leyser, 138–42.



clothing and female reclusion

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In Mary of Egypt the saint is both elusive in a literal sense (she runs away) and in a metaphorical sense (in terms of her figurative meaning). The Life of Christina of Markyate, in contrast, is concerned with a real, living and familiar woman (familiar to the author, and to the initial audience). […] Any identification between Christina of Markyate and Mary of Egypt can only be fleeting and partial as the virgin must not be conflated with the reformed harlot.7

However, the polarization of these narratives on this basis is undercut by the fact that both works are literary artifacts. Albeit produced under different conditions and with a more distinctly biographical bent, The Life of Christina of Markyate is as rich in metaphorical, literary meaning as its antecedent, and its figurative use of cloth is only one amongst many avenues through which to explore this lyricism.

Sartorial Culture and Female Reclusion

From covering and disguising to signifying social status and offering nurture, cloth and clothing is central to human experience. As Ronald A. Schwartz explains in his study of the anthropological significance of textiles, “more than any other material product, clothing plays a symbolic role in mediating the relationship between nature, man, and his sociocultural environment. In dressing up, man addresses himself, his fellows, and his world.”8 Cloth is integral to the ways in which individuals represent themselves and engage with one another in Western society. It makes visually apparent the power hierarchies within which people operate; as Burns writes, “textiles stand at the nexus of the personal and the cultural, often linking specific individual expressions to institutionalized and hierarchical social structures.”9 Burns expands upon this theory in her study of textiles’ significance in French literature, to explain that: costume, fabric, and textile work can be seen to participate in a complex system of fabrications that move constantly between individual bodies and the social sphere, between material objects and various cultural representations of them, creating a relational dynamic perhaps best exemplified by the concept of an imaginaire vestimentaire (sartorial imaginary).10

Clothing consistently mediates the recluse’s relationship with the external world in these hagiographies. This “sartorial imagination” operates as a means of understanding the female recluse’s relationship with the inherently patriarchal values structuring religious experience. Structures which, as we shall see, seek to control, and at crucial points repress the women’s personal and spiritual agency. 7  Sharon K. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth Century England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 67.

8  Ronald A. Schwartz, “Uncovering the Secret Vice: Toward an Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment,” in The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Culture and Adornment, ed. Justine M. Cordwell and Ronald A. Schwartz (1979; Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2011), 31. 9  E. Jane Burns, “Introduction,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 1. 10  Burns, “Introduction,” 4.

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In Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), we find these structures revealingly delineated in relation to female reclusion. The thirteenth-century anchoritic guide echoed St. Paul’s famous dictum from the first letter to the Corinthians surrounding the veiling of women and stipulated that the female anchorite must wear simple clothing.11 Linen, even, is not allowed, “bute hit beo of hearde ant of greate heorden” (unless it is made of stiff and coarse fibres).12 However, we also find more subversive references to sartorial culture within the anchoritic text. Jocelyn WoganBrowne aptly describes “the Guide for Anchoresses’ image of the martyrs as gleeful children improvidently tearing up their robes—their bodies—because their rich father—God—can easily give them others,”13 citing the following intriguing passage as evidence: Nes Seinte Peter ant Seinte Andrew þer-uore istraht o rode? Sein Lorenz, o þe gridil? Ant laðlese meidnes, þe tittes itoren of, tohwiðeret o hweoles, heafdes bicoruen? Ah ure sotschipe is sutel; ant heo weren ilich þeose ȝape children þe habbeð [riche] feaderes, þe willes ant waldes toteoreð hare claðes forte habbe neowe. Vre alde curtel is þe flesch, þet we of Adam, ure alde feader, habbeð; þe neowe we schulen underuon of Godd, ure riche feader.

Weren’t St. Peter and St. Andrew stretched on the cross for it? St. Laurence, on the gridiron? And innocent virgins, their breasts torn off, broken on wheels, beheaded? But our foolishness is clear; and they were like those cunning children who have rich fathers, who tear their clothes on purpose in order to get new ones. Our old garment is the flesh, which we have from Adam, our ancestor; we shall receive the new one from God, our rich father.14

The Ancrene writer here compares the rich garbs of the saints and virgin martyrs with the earthly bodies that they sacrificed. His language highlights their autonomy; wilful and wanton, these women cannot be contained, and refuse to be restricted by the social mores imbued within the earthly garb and sexualized bodies “þet we of Adam, ure alde feader, habbeð.” Indeed, Mary of Egypt and Christina of Markyate join their foremothers in rejecting such elision of flesh and cloth. As we shall see, they likewise tear up the secular clothing imposed upon them for new habits, from “Godd, ure riche feader.” 11  Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–2006), 8.19.145–47, at p. 159. In full, St. Paul’s dictum stated that, “The man indeed ought not to cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. For the man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man. Therefore ought the woman to have a power over her head, because of the angels” (1 Corinthians 11:7–10). 12  Ancrene Wisse, 8.16.118–19, p. 158; Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), 158.

13  Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture, 1150–1300: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 108. 14  Ancrene Wisse, 6.7.201–208, p. 137; trans. Millett, 137.



The Life of Mary of Egypt

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Mary of Egypt’s story strongly asserts the power of material objects in the devotional practices of the lay religious yet offers a different understanding of textile materiality for the female recluse. The legend is told from the viewpoint of the priest Zosimus, an exemplar of community-oriented monasticism. He discovers Mary while he journeys alone in the desert sampling reclusive life, and she recounts the tale of her religious conversion. She tells him of her early life in Alexandria, where, she explains, she rejected her parents from the age of twelve, entering “unstoppably and insatiably into the vice of lust.”15 After seventeen years in “the fire of luxury,”16 Mary tells Zosimus that she climbed aboard a ship travelling to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Exultation, attracted not by the religious fervour of the pilgrimage but by “some young men standing on the shore, about ten in number, brisk enough in body and motion, and visibly good for that which was pleasing to me.”17 On arrival in Jerusalem, however, Mary was repelled from the doors of the church. Distraught, she prayed to a statue of the Virgin Mary outside, promising “[I will] renounce this world and its actions and everything which is in it, and will at once go out to wherever you, my surety, lead me”18 if she might gain entry. The Virgin granted Mary’s prayer, and Mary kept her promise, following the Holy Mother’s instructions to cross the Jordan and find “true peace”19 as a recluse in the desert. While the statue as a material, visual object is essential in guiding Mary’s conversion, it simultaneously leads her to a devotional lifestyle which is contingent upon the rejection of material goods—most significantly, clothing. Indeed, Mary’s rejection of clothing is symbolic of the worldly renunciation which she promises the Holy Virgin. Mary tells Zosimus that she has lived in the desert for forty-seven years, and the garments she wore when she began her travels have disintegrated.20 This disintegration is a practical result of the ascetic life which she has lived as a recluse. It obviates the corporeal suffering through which she is brought closer to God; her skin has burned black by years of enduring the sun, and we are told she “endured much from the freezing of cold and the burning of heat.”21 However, Mary’s lack of clothing signals more than simply the ravages of her ascetic lifestyle. Her rejection of clothing as a recluse marks her escape from the traditional laws and symbols of earthly society, in more ways than one. From the outset of the Life, cloth is used as a signifier of social position. When Zosimus, seeking greater knowledge of the various

15  Paul the Deacon, Vita Sanctae Mariae Egiptiacae, ed. and trans. Jane Stevenson, in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), 51–98 at 88. 16  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 88.

17  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 89. 18  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 91. 19  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 91. 20  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 93. 21  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 93.

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paths of religious devotion to salvation before discovering Mary, arrives at a monastery on the Jordan, the monks immediately recognize him as a monastic, “seeing by his dress and appearance that he was a religious.”22 Just as Zosimus’ clothing marks his choice to follow the monastic vocation, Mary’s lack thereof signals her own devotional lifestyle. Indeed, her lack of clothing signifies the independence of her existence. Not affiliated with any monastic house, Mary’s relationship with God is importantly unmediated. The fact that her conversion is guided by her devotion to the Virgin Mary, rather than any priest or patriarchal male figure, is key here. She is directed, instead, to live out a personal, autonomous devotion in the desert. Mary’s nakedness is, however, fleeting. As soon as the male cleric invades her life of solitary devotion, she must cover her body. She initially flees Zosimus, declaring: forgive me for God’s sake, I cannot turn round and show myself to you. For I am a woman, and entirely naked of any corporeal covering, as you can see, and the shameful part of my body is uncovered. But if you truly wish to receive the prayers of a sinful woman, throw me the garment which is around you, so that I can cover my womanly infirmity and turn to you and accept your prayers.23

Ashamed of her lack of covering, the female recluse begs for the priest’s cloak. To an extent, the garment comes to signify the priest’s authority over the recluse as, from this point onwards, she seeks his mediation in her relationship with the divine through communion. Her solitary, autonomous devotion to all intents and purposes appears to end at this point; however, while the narrative seems to use the cloak to resituate Mary within priestly, patriarchal control, the garment can also be read more subversively as marking the female recluse with the authority of the priest. As Simon Lavery explains in his discussion of the scene, “When she puts on his [Zosimus’] cloak, she not only covers the physical and sexual attributes of the woman, she also symbolically takes on part of the male, monastic identity of its owner.”24 Indeed, although Zosimus is inserted into the narrative to mediate her relationship with the divine through communion,25 it is Mary who persistently exerts priestly prerogatives. It is she who verbally guides and instructs Zosimus, who continually cedes to her virtue and superiority as an ascetic.26 Her bemoaning of “womanly infirmity” reads as the traditional misogynistic imposition of the Life’s clerical writer, an attempt to contain her power, but she is not so easily controlled. As we have seen, her physical infirmity only serves to emphasize her spiritual strength and endurance. If we trace Mary’s relationship with fabric throughout the text as a whole, it persistently conveys this subversive independence. Her lust-driven pilgrimage to Jeru22  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 82.

23  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 85–86.

24  Simon Lavery, “The Story of Mary the Egyptian in Medieval England,” in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Blackrock: Four Courts, 1996), 132. 25  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 94.

26  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 86–87, 89, 94.



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salem is equally framed by cloth. When telling Zosimus of her journey, she explains, “I, throwing down the spindle which I had in my hand (as if after a time, it might come to hold me) ran to the sea whither I had seen people running.”27 Throughout the medieval period, the act of clothwork was associated with female respectability,28 a respectability which she describes as controlling here, and which she evades in following her sexual desires. In this sense, as both a sinner and a holy recluse, Mary seeks to escape the social norms and restrictions which come with clothing and clothwork. The independence she exercised as a lay person is not rejected in her years of reclusion. If we return to her initial description, cloth is again used as an expression of autonomy. When Zosimus encounters the saint we are told, “It was a woman that he saw, her body coal-black and burned by the heat of the sun, the hair of her head like white wool [lana], and like it in quantity, descending no further than to her neck.”29 Mary’s hair is fascinatingly described here as wool, the original natural, raw product which is worked to produce social markers such as Zosimus’ cloak. However, this wool is not worked. Mary leaves her hair natural, defining her own organic relationship with cloth. The description indicates that it is not so much the material itself which she evades in her reclusive life, but the refashioned, wrought nature of cloth when it is shaped to meet the needs of society in garments. Indeed, Mary’s rejection of clothing foregrounds her “woolly” hair (“capillos […] ut lana albos”) and black skin (“mulier […] corpore nigerrimo”), making explicit the fact that the saint is not white, and does not adhere to medieval Western conceptions of Christian piety as white. The text bears with it clearly pejorative implications with its inherently racist descriptor for Afro hair, but Mary’s actions in themselves, and her decision to grow her hair naturally, nonetheless emphasize the fact that her sense of selfhood as a reformed holy woman is inextricable from her status as a black woman. Her description propagates what Roland Betancourt refers to in his important study of intersectionality in the Byzantine world as “the ancient environmental theories of racial difference, which treated a dark complexion as a darkening by the sun.”30 As Betancourt writes, such theories recur in the lives of the desert saints; “blackness—associated with the loss of youthful beauty—appears in the lives of desert ascetics as a clear marker of virtue and self-discipline.”31 Mary’s 27  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 89.

28  An association perhaps most concisely expressed in the “Maxims” of the Exeter Book, a tenthcentury manuscript, which clearly state “a damsel it beseems to be at her board.” See “Maxims,” trans. Benjamin Thorpe, Codex Exoniensis. A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, from a Manuscript in the Library of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, with an English Translation, Notes, and Indexes (London: W. Pickering, 1842), 337. 29  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 85.

30  Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 186.

31  Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 191. Betancourt’s insightful work offers further important exploration of race as a discourse in Mary’s Life, particularly as it relates to the corpus of early eastern hagiography. Indeed, using the Life as the introduction to the topic of Byzantine intersectionality, he writes, “This narrative simultaneously undoes the aspects of racial prejudice

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rejection of clothing thus places the emphatically black body of the holy woman at the centre of the text’s depiction of reclusive devotion, stripping back Western associations between Christian piety and whiteness. Mary’s naked body, specifically her “woolly hair,” comes to signify her weaving of her own identity in reclusion, an identity that is at once inherently corporeal, the product of the emphatically female and black body which Zosimus must cover, and distinct from the laws of society aligned with Zosimus. Casting off the garments of secular life in her reclusion, she is in contrast clothed in divine teaching. As she explains, “I am nourished by, and am covered with a garment of, the word of God, who contains all things. For man does not live by bread alone, and all who have no clothing will be clothed in stone, having discarded the outer covering of sins.”32 The language of materiality and the conceptual value of clothing are still central in conveying her state of virtue, yet this is a state which is ultimately transcendental, belonging to a spiritual plane beyond the earthliness symbolized by cloth’s materiality. No longer a simple spinner, Mary has become a different kind of clothworker in her reclusion. She weaves tales of spiritual, didactic truth; her tale of redemption is written on her body as a vessel of that word. Eager to hear her tale, Zosimus pointedly cries out, “Tell it for God’s sake, Mother, speak, and do not lose the thread of so salvific a narrative.”33 While the legend seems to subsume the potentially subversive figure of the naked recluse, her authority thus remains undeniably prevalent and troubling to the masculine ethos of the church. Zosimus may cover her, bringing her into a more traditional relationship through communion, but her naked body allows her to weave her own life of sanctity and independence in the desert, a life which seeps through the cracks of Zosimus’ tale and the male-authored hagiography.

The Life of Christina of Markyate

Reading the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate through cloth reveals a similar trajectory in the representation of female religious reclusion. Christina likewise seeks to carve out a religious life for herself in opposition to a worldly, secular existence under the yoke of patriarchal control. The Life details her struggles to win freedom from her family and the church in order to dedicate her life to Christ. Success comes in the form of religious reclusion, following the example of the Desert Mother. Later, Christina embraces monastic life as the leader of a priory, but it is her flight towards reclusion, a quest for freedom which is persistently illustrated through her relationship with clothing, with which we are concerned here. Integral to this first major section of the narrative is the frequent and prevalent use of clothing as a symbol of inherently androcentric secular values. This textile inherent in some early Christian texts and reveals to us the multifaceted intersection of skin color, gender stereotypes, racial identity, and ethnic grouping conceived by a medieval author.” See Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 25–26. 32  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 93.

33  Paul the Deacon, Vita, ed. Stevenson, 89.



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subtext predicates these values upon a corporeality and lust framed as sinful, which ultimately controls and even violently oppresses the female body through marriage. Like Mary of Egypt, in rejecting these socially coded garments, Christina refuses to be positioned within the sexual marketplace of secular culture. Amongst the clearest examples of this repressive use of clothing is one of the Life’s most famous scenes, Christina’s attempted seduction by Ranulph, Bishop of Durham (ca. 1060–1128), the paramour of her aunt. In attempting to win over the sixteen-year-old, the bishop “seized the maiden by one of the sleeves of her tunic,”34 grasping her clothing as an extension of her body. She escapes and he continues to pursue the girl, specifically offering her “silken garments” among other riches, but is again rejected with “utter contempt.”35 The bishop uses clothing here as an attempt to physically control Christina. Grasping her sleeve in his desire, he reveals his assumption that, for women at least, cloth and body are fused, inextricably connected and reflective of one another. He interprets cloth’s materiality as marking her as a corporeal, and specifically carnal, being, one which might be wooed in a material marketplace dominated by men. The holy maiden’s rejection of his gifts signals not only her rebuff of his lust and refusal to enter into this marketplace, but makes apparent the inherent lack of value in such earthly material goods. Ranulph’s is the first of many attempts to control Christina’s body through her clothing in the Life. Time and again, Christina’s clothing is (mis)interpreted as a manifestation or extension of her physical body. In their studies of the symbolic prevalence of clothwork in French romance, Burns and Morgan Boharski have put forward useful terms which aptly describe this repeated paradigm. Burns refers to “sartorial bodies” as “the social bodies forged from both fabric and flesh in courtly literary texts,” which “emerge from a reading practice that conceives of clothes as an active force in generating social bodies,”36 while Boharski writes of “clothbodies […] in romance as physically replacing the woman’s body.”37 Developed and applied to the romance genre, Burns’s theory in particular describes the secular, sociallyoriented gaze which persistently troubles Christina and posits her as a sexual object. As we shall see, Christina’s identity is both externally imposed and regulated through the use of “sartorial bodies” by those who seek to restrain her within the confines of marriage. Indeed, Ranulph’s interpretation of Christina’s “sartorial body” as denoting sexual availability and lavish materiality parallels her own family’s assessment of her as a marriageable commodity. It is he who arranges her betrothal with Burthred, a local noble, a betrothal which is framed as an entirely worldly transaction. Her family enthusiastically jumps at the opportunity because they see her, with her beauty 34  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. 35  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 8.

36  Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 12.

37  Morgan Boharski, “Woven Words: Clothwork and the Representation of Feminine Expression and Identity in Old French Romance,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 2018), 70.

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and intelligence, as an asset: “They did not know how to see beyond worldly possessions, thinking that anyone lacking these and seeking only the unseen world would certainly be lost.”38 The Life thus sets up a clear opposition between the earthly, material world of Ranulph and Christina’s parents (the world of “sartorial bodies”), and the immaterial, sacred domain of holy life. The clash between these ideals and Christina’s incompatibility with the secular world is continuously illustrated. At the banquet of the merchants’ festival, Christina’s parents allot her the task of cupbearer, with the intent that it would soften her attitude towards marriage: they commanded her to get up and lay aside the cloak she had around her, so that, with her garments fastened to her sides with bands and her sleeves rolled up her arms, she should courteously offer drinks to the nobility. For indeed they hoped that the compliments paid to her by onlookers and the accumulation of little sips of wine would break her resolution and prepare her body for the deed of corruption.39

With her clothes fastened tightly around her sides and her sleeves revealing her arms, Christina’s parents style her “sartorial body,” marketing their daughter as a sexualized object. Garnering the compliments and admiration of onlookers, the task is designed to make her amenable to such objectification. Importantly, the setting of this scene, the banquet hall, was in many ways the epicentre of social values and order in the Middle Ages. As Samuel Fanous explains, Symbolically, banquets signify the culmination of social ideals: the pleasures of meeting individuals, families, friends and neighbours; the celebration of the fruitfulness of the earth through food and drink; the reaffirmation of social bonds and the maintenance of the social order, at the heart of which is fecundity exemplified by the ideal of marriage and the nuclear family.40

Christina’s parents thus attempt to place their daughter within the control of the secular rules and mores upheld and affirmed by the banquet as a social space. However, Christina seeks the protection of a greater, spiritual hierarchy: “Against the favours of human flattery she fixed in her mind the memory of the Mother of God,” reciting the “Hail, Mary.”41 Like Mary of Egypt, she looks to the Virgin as a support in her resistance against her material, secular surroundings. While Christina is at times able to persuade her suitor Burthred to respect her wishes and support her in this aim, he is each time shamed by his peers and her family into using force to reclaim her as his wife.42 Supported by her parents, he takes the case to Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (ca. 1168–1253). It is decided in his favour, and when Christina rises to leave his company, we are told that he “seized hold of her cloak to keep her back; as she moved off, she loosened it at the neck and, leaving it, like another Joseph, in his hand, she quickly escaped 38  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 21.

39  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 10–11.

40  Samuel Fanous, “Christina of Markyate and the Double Crown,” in Christina of Markyate, ed. Fanous and Leyser, 64. 41  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 11.

42  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 11–12.



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into an inner room.”43 The passage replicates the exchange between Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in Genesis, another scene in which an attempt is made to seduce a virtuous youth, and in which the seducer only succeeds in grasping their victim’s garment.44 We see very clearly here both the man’s elision of body and cloth, and Christina’s rejection of this fusion in dropping the cloak—separating her corporeal body from the sartorial object. The movement signifies her renunciation of the worldly, secular life he attempts to constrain her within—a life firmly equated here with the material, specifically cloth. Transcending the physicality of lust and marriage, Christina seeks autonomy as a Bride of Christ, prioritizing the “unseen world” overlooked by Burthred and her family. This endeavour is significantly depicted as a rejection of the persistent (mis)interpretation of her “sartorial body.” This moment after the trial is immediately followed by her expulsion from her father’s house, a pivotal scene in which she is stripped both of her secular trappings and the keys to the household, the quintessential symbol of secular domesticity.45 As in Mary of Egypt, the holy life which Christina seeks to lead is clearly framed here as existing outside of the laws and control of her father. As Fanous explains, the scene emulates a feminine power encoded within the lives of many virgin martyrs: “Ostensibly the stripped virgin is passive. Yet she is denuded precisely because she refuses to submit to the social idea of marriage. In her nakedness, she becomes a figure of defiant resistance to male hegemony.”46 Stripped of the garments which the text has so closely aligned with licentiousness and the sexual marketplace of marriage, the naked Christina, like Mary, becomes a model of the very active, autonomous rejection of these values. This scene marks a pivotal step in her escape from this male-dominated society, towards religious agency. Yet again, as in Mary of Egypt, we find that sartorial discourses do bear currency in describing Christina’s search for a life of holiness as she seeks to define her own identity through clothes. The passage continues: “In great rage and with the keys in his hand, he said to the girl, stripped as she was of her bodily garments, but more blessedly clothed with the gems of virtue: ‘Get out, as fast as you can. If you want to have Christ, then naked go and follow Christ.’”47 Stripped of her physical garb, Christina is nonetheless metaphorically garbed, clothed instead in the virtue of her actions. A guest at the house intercedes for her, but “for her part, Christina would have chosen to be sent out naked and at night had she been able in this way to have won her freedom to serve Christ, and when morning came she left the house without anyone preventing her.”48 As Mary’s naked body is dressed in the word of 43  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 23.

44  Genesis 39:7–13.

45  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 23.

46  Fanous, “Christina of Markyate and the Double Crown,” 59. 47  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 24. 48  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 24.

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God, Christina’s bareness also signifies her great virtue; she is in a sense dressed in the more transcendental riches of a holy life. Her expulsion and stripping are emphatically described as a choice, a conscious rejection of that clothing which so persistently symbolizes the constraints of secular life and expectations in favour of religious freedom and independence. This concept is cemented in a dream she has shortly after this episode, in which the Virgin Mary appears at church and promises her deliverance from her strife. Leaving the church with great joy, she sees Burthred on the ground in a black cape. He tries to grab her as she passes, “But Christina gathered her garments about her (they were flowing garments of a dazzling white), and clasping them close to her side, she passed by him untouched.”49 The vision closely parallels both Ranulph’s attempted seduction and the scene after the trial—a parallel which the excerpts emphasize in their shared lexicon. In each instance the men move to control Christina by seizing and holding her clothing. Yet here, Christina and her robes are safe from Burthred’s grasp. In the transcendental, spiritual reality of the vision, her white garments reflect her true identity and virtue as a “blessedly clothed” Bride of Christ. While Burthred’s black garb signals his worldliness and sin, her sartorial and physical body are fused on her own, religious, terms. Like Mary with her woolly hair, Christina seeks coverings that reflect her body, identity, and spiritual values, garments symbolic of the marriage to Christ which she herself has chosen. Furthermore, like Mary, she assumes an authority and independence which is defined as masculine in finally escaping her family for the religious life. Plotting her escape with her aunt and the manservant Loric, Christina (here called by her birth name Theodora) prepares masculine garb to disguise herself: When she saw they were all busy with their tasks, she immediately jumped up, full of trust in the Lord. Secretly she took the men’s garments she had got ready beforehand so as to disguise herself, and set out swathed from head to foot in a long cloak. When her sister Matilda saw her hurrying out, for she recognized her from her clothes, she followed her. Christina noticed this and pretended she was going to the church of our Blessed Lady. But as she walked one of the sleeves of the man’s garment she was hiding beneath her cloak fell to the ground, whether by accident or on purpose I do not know. When Matilda saw it she said, ‘What is this, Theodora, that you are trailing on the ground?’

Christina replied with an innocent look, ‘Sister dear, take it with you when you go back to the house, for it is getting in my way.’ And she entrusted her with the silk garment and her father’s keys, saying, ‘Take these too, dear one, so that if our father returns in the meantime and wants to take something from the chest he will not become angry on not finding the keys.’50

This complex passage undercuts the liberating potential of cross-dressing for Christina. Unlike Mary, Christina never assumes male clothing; indeed, the garment almost betrays her to her sister, in Christina’s own words, “getting in my way.” Dressing like a man offers no true freedom for Christina precisely because 49  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 25–26.

50  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 33–34.



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her female body is no barrier to her escape. She is initially hesitant to ride away, and we are given the same kind of clumsy suggestion of female weakness that we saw in Paul the Deacon’s Life when she berates herself, “Why delay, oh fugitive? Why respect your femininity? Put on manly courage and mount the horse like a man. So she put aside her fears, and jumped on the horse as if she were a man, set spurs to its flanks.”51 However, although her agency is defined here as manly, she nonetheless does not need to alter her physical appearance in assuming this power. While the text seeks to tell us that she is performing an action outside the realm of female capability, transcending the limits of her feminine body, the clothing offers another story. Her courage is innate. The only male prerogative she assumes is that of action, action which would have been prevented had she masqueraded as a man. Christina’s escape is a culmination of her efforts and persecution. At this point she escapes to Flamstead, where she is finally welcomed to reclusive life by the anchoress Alfwen, “and on that same day she who had been accustomed to wearing silk dresses and luxurious furs in her father’s house now put on a rough garment as her religious habit.”52 She is finally able to wear the simple garments of the recluse, a garb symbolic of her lifestyle and religious devotion, of her escape from the worldly secular existence she faced in her father’s and husband’s houses. She spends two years at Flamstead, but these years are not carefree. Her family and Burthred continue to harass her, and she places herself under the protection of the hermit Roger, a sub-deacon of St. Alban’s Abbey. She dwells in a makeshift anchorhold, “no bigger than a span-and-a-half,” so small that “even the covering needed when she was cold could not be fitted in, given the narrowness of the place.”53 As she fully embraces life as an anchoress, her ascetic lifestyle requires, like Mary, that she entirely reject all clothing. However, reclusion, for Christina, is necessary only for as long as her parents seek to prevent her religious autonomy. Indeed, as long as she must so stridently reject the lifestyle imposed upon her in hiding, she rejects all material, cloth coverings. Her escape from that life is depicted quite literally as an abandonment of the clothed body which they continually seek to control. Christina’s Life is rich with sartorial metaphors and instances of clothwork. Indeed, her relationship with cloth changes once her status as a Bride of Christ is recognized and she no longer needs to live as a recluse. As she begins to engage more actively with the secular and even political world, particularly in her final years living in her priory and advising Abbot Geoffrey of St. Albans (1100–1146), she begins to weave and cloth takes on another, more relic-like, form of signification which deserves fuller exploration elsewhere. However, one connection remains strong: the equation of the sartorial body with feelings of lust and temptation. We later find Christina’s clothing again operating as a kind of earthly skin. Faced with the sexual temptation of her attraction to her second patron, the unnamed cleric who offers her refuge after she leaves Roger, “Only one thing brought her respite: 51  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 34.

52  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 34. 53  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 40.

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the presence of her patron. For then, her passion cooled; for in his absence she used to be so inwardly inflamed that she thought the clothes which clung to her body might catch fire!”54 Her lust is imagined not through the sensations of her physical body, but rather through her clothing. This episode parallels an earlier scene, a description of Roger’s devotional focus and prowess: “once when he was rapt in prayer his concentration was so intense that the devil, invisibly incensed, visibly set fire to the cowl that clung to his back as he prayed, and even so could not distract him.”55 These passages suggest that the carnal and secular body, that which might be distracted by temptation, is reflected and equated more with clothing, while the holy body of the ascetic, the naked body of the recluse, is reserved as a route to Christ and spiritual understanding.

Conclusion

This alignment of the socially active sartorial body with sexuality and transgression underpins these lives’ understanding of textile materiality for women seeking reclusive life. Their sartorial imagery opens up a more complex understanding of the gender politics of reclusion—the subversive potential for female independence—than the narratives appear to portray on the surface. Textiles in these hagiographies are inherently textual, and reading these women’s lives through clothwork reveals this more gynocentric subtext. Discarding garments which both posit them as erotic bodies and erode their spiritual autonomy for existences “blessedly clothed with gems of virtue,”56 Mary of Egypt and Christina of Markyate recover their sartorial autonomy in reclusion, redefining their own spiritual identities beyond the confines of patriarchal society. Indeed, in eschewing the garb of patriarchal culture, these women reject conventional narratives of femininity, weaving their own stories.

54  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 47.

55  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 41. 56  The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, 73.



clothing and female reclusion

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Anna McKay completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, under an Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship. Her thesis focused on the development of a textile hermeneutic in medieval English devotional literature, drawing upon a wide range of biblical apocrypha, hagiographies, prayers, mystical texts, and romances to explore women’s spirituality as a “fabricated” practice. More broadly, her research interests also include Victorian medievalism, particularly in the works of women writers.

MATERIALITY, DOCUMENTARY AUTHORITY, AND THE CIRCULATION OF THE KATHERINE GROUP JENNY C. BLEDSOE*

Likely composed between

1190 and 1220, the works of the Katherine Group include three saints’ lives (Katerine, Margarete, and Iuliene), a virginity treatise (Hali Meiðhad / Holy Maidenhood), and an allegorical homily (Sawles Warde / Custody of the Soul).1 Given their shared West Midlands regional dialect and common themes, the Katherine Group is often considered part of the larger “Ancrene Wisse Group,” which also includes the early thirteenth-century anchoritic rule Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) and Wooing Group prayers.2 While all eleven works3 are considered anchoritic literature, the Katherine Group saints’ lives also addressed a wider lay audience from the beginning. The Katherine Group hagiographies mention books literally and figuratively, shaping the audience’s orientation to the written word by linking textual authority to fleshly proof. References to Margaret’s “book-skin” (boc felle) and talismanic, self-authorizing vellum codices engage the reader’s sense of touch, characterizing touch as a measure of proof while also fashioning a relic out of the manuscript itself through proximity to the holy body of the saint (historically) and the anchoress (contemporarily). By grounding their trustworthiness in bodily-centred (if precarious) authority, the Early Middle English texts both bolster the anchoress’s role as a spiritual example for the community and reflect the material realities of an anchoritic-lay textual culture whose circulation was ephemeral and piecemeal. Building on Catherine Innes-Parker’s theory about co-existing informal and formal vernacular textual cultures in the West Midlands, I will show how the Katherine Group narratives and codicological evidence indicate an anchoritic–lay literary culture operating adjacent to clerical manuscript culture. The “informal,” or ephemeral, textual community shaped lay

*  I would like to thank Emory University and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s Foremothers Fellowship for funding my Katherine Group manuscript research in 2016. I am also grateful to James H. Morey and Michelle M. Sauer for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. 1  The Katherine Group hagiographies are legends of three early Christian saints: Katherine of Alexandria (ca. 287–ca. 305), Margaret of Antioch (ca. 289–304), and Juliana of Nicomedia (ca. 286–ca. 304).

2  J. R. R. Tolkien labelled the shared dialect of one Ancrene Wisse manuscript and the Bodley manuscript of the Katherine Group as “Language AB” in “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad,” Essays and Studies 14 (1929): 104–26.

3  I reference eleven works, rather than the traditional ten (Ancrene Wisse, five Katherine Group texts, and four Wooing Group prayers), following Catherine Innes-Parker who considers “On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi” part of the WG since it precedes three WG prayers in London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A. xiv. See: Catherine Innes-Parker, ed. and trans., The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers (Toronto: Broadview, 2015), 22.

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literacy and manuscript use, including perceptions about the documentary authority of vernacular textual artifacts. This materially engaged aesthetic arises from both the anchorite’s place in the community and the nature of Early Middle English literary culture and textual production in the West Midlands. Linguistic, codicological, and literary evidence shows that the Katherine Group circulated more widely than the small number (three) of surviving manuscripts suggests, including via oral/memorial transmission and fragmentary circulation in booklets and on scraps of vellum.4 In her study of the Wooing Group, Innes-Parker proposed the existence of two vernacular literary cultures in the early thirteenth-century West Midlands: one, an informal circulation of scrolls and pamphlets amongst anchoresses (and perhaps the laity) who lived at the margins of institutional religion; another, more formal but less abundant, circulation of manuscripts amongst monks within the formal structures of institutional religion, for whom the vernacular prayers were indeed available only sporadically. Ironically, this might imply that vernacular prayers were more readily available through the former, informal, culture of textual dissemination than within the institution which, formally at least, attended to the instruction of those who read these prayers.5

Innes-Parker argues that Ancrene Wisse’s references to supplementary prayers and booklet circulation describe the informal anchoritic–lay textual culture thriving in the thirteenth century.6 Similarly, the Katherine Group circulated in ephemeral modes, leading to missing branches in editors’ trees of textual transmission. Both literary motifs and

4  The three manuscripts are London, British Library, Royal MS 17 A. xxvii (Royal), Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 34 (Bodley), and London, British Library, Cotton MS Titus D. xviii (Titus). The current consensus on the paleographical dating is as follows: Royal dates to 1220–1230, Bodley to the late 1230s or early 1240s, and Titus to 1240–1250. In LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150 to 1325, compiled by Margaret Laing, version 3.2, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2013, http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html), see Laing’s discussion within individual entries for Royal, Bodley, and Titus. Dorothy Kim argues that the three saints’ lives of the Royal manuscript were first intended to circulate as a separate booklet; see: “Female Readers, Passion Devotion, and the History of MS Royal 17 A. xxvii,” Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012): 153–214, especially 164–65. 5  Catherine Innes-Parker, “Reading and Devotional Practice: The Wooing Group Prayers of British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. xiv,” Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions, ed. InnesParker and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 137–49 at 148n11.

6  In this and subsequent references, AW refers to Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–2006). Innes-Parker describes Ancrene Wisse’s references to prayers and scrolls circulating among anchoresses: “the author refers to prayers which had been written out for them [see AW 1.28, p. 18]. The anchoresses also shared and exchanged scrolls and booklets [see AW 4.58.989–90, p. 94; 4.90.1511–14, p. 107]. The author assumes this is part of the devotional culture of his time; for example, he tells his readers, ‘Þe ureisuns þet Ich nabbe buten ane imerket beoð iwriten oueral […] Leoteð written on a scrowe hwet-se ȝe ne kunnen’ (‘Copies of the prayers that I have only referred to briefly […] are available everywhere. Have any that you do not know by heart copied on to a scroll’) [see AW, 1.353–8, p. 17]” (Innes-Parker, “Reading and Devotional Practice,” 138).

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codicological evidence demonstrate wider circulation, reflecting material realities of manuscript production and textual exchange in the English West Midlands. Christopher Cannon and Liz Herbert McAvoy have examined how material realities influence anchoritic literary patterns; McAvoy writes, “Such ideas, which are formulated out of material realities surrounding the thinker within any given culture, therefore find their way from the landscape and the material world around us into our cognitive processes themselves, rematerializing in the ways in which we envisage our world, its societies, its bodies and what they signify.”7 The imagined scraps of skin handled and passed along as relics in the saints’ lives in turn imbue their real-life counterparts—the scraps of anchoritic literature circulating “everywhere” (oueral)—with an extra-clerical spiritual authority by virtue of their association with the anchoress and her holy, enclosed body.

Materiality and Documentary Authority

Studies of the past decade analyze the aesthetic, sensory entanglement of material support and medieval literary content. In “Legible Skins,” Sarah Kay describes the multiple animal engagements involved in the writing and reading of medieval manuscripts (not to mention the production of the materials themselves): “The act of writing comprises the touch of human skin on animal skin, goose feather pen in hand, oak gall ink in a horn inkwell close by; and reading involves renewing this contact of skin on skin, as the feather’s traces are deciphered.”8 Focusing on the Katherine Group legend, Adrienne Williams Boyarin demonstrates that Seinte Margarete likens the saint’s body to a legal document; Margaret’s body is “‘iseilet’ (sealed) by Christ himself, in the same way a legal document would be sealed.”9 Applying Emily Steiner’s scholarship on later medieval charters of Christ, Williams Boyarin explains how a textual artifact “equate[s] sacramentality with documentality”: “The [Charter] lyric, by continually displacing the literary onto the textual and 7  Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space, and the Solitary Life (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), 147; see chapter five of Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 139–71.

8  Sarah Kay, “Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading,” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 13–32 at 13. See also Sarah Kay, “Original Skin: Flaying, Reading, and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 35–74. 9  Adrienne Williams Boyarin, “Sealed Flesh, Book-Skin: How to Read the Female Body in the Early Middle English Seinte Margarete,” Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Victoria: ELS, 2009), 87–106 at 91. In a recent article, Elizabeth Robertson discusses this passage, arguing that the author describes the seal and evokes the sense of touch in order to emphasize the saint’s status as a female virgin: “the virgin martyr Margaret’s penetrability is protected by a seal […] which both defines her as feminine (a virgin with a penetrable vagina) and allows her to become like Christ and thereby overcome her gender,” Robertson, “Noli me tangere: The Enigma of Touch in Middle English Religious Literature and Art for and about Women,” in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. Katie L. Walter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 29–56 at 37–38.

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the textual onto the material, reverses—really collapses—tenor and vehicle […]: it maps the word made flesh onto the flesh made word in such a way as to obscure the boundaries between the signifier and the signified.”10 Medieval authors commonly deploy imagery that forges a metaphorical connection between the text and the materials on which it is written. Or as Susanna Fein puts it, many Middle English works exhibit “codicological self-reflexivity.”11 Going beyond codicological self-reference, the hagiographies collapse the distinction between the texts of the legends and the bodies of the saints. Like an animal ready for slaughter, Margaret is stripped naked and hung on a rack, “þa awariede werlahen leiden se luðerliche on hire leofliche lich, þet hit brec oueral ant liðerede o blode” (the wicked traitors laid so savagely upon her lovely body that it was torn all over and was lathered in blood).12 Her miraculous tortures bathe her skin in blood, as if softening the skin for use as a manuscript folio. Although the verb “leðeren” is uncommon in Middle English, each of the Katherine Group legends includes a passage describing the saint’s body as “lathered in blood.”13 This near-homophone furthers the association with parchment making. Not only are their skins lathered as if in preparation to become parchment, but also the saints’ skins, being “lathered,” sound as if they are becoming “leðer” (leather).14 By describing the saint and her skin as a writing surface, the author equates the saint’s body with the textual corpus inscribed on animal hide. The material metaphors extend from the metaphorical to the practical, including advice about what types of textual artifacts to trust. In the opening lines of Seinte Katerine, the author describes Katherine’s background to the audience, quickly outlining her rejection of foolish romances and love songs: “nalde ha none ronnes ne nane luue-runes leornin” (nor did she wish to learn or listen to any poems or love stories) and her study of Scripture instead.15 The author privileges Scripture above all other texts, calling literature with secular themes “sotte,” or stupid. Among the 10  Williams Boyarin, “Sealed Flesh, Book-Skin,” 98, citing Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 85.

11  Susanna Fein, “Quatrefoil and Quatrefolia: The Devotional Layout of an Alliterative Poem,” Journal of the Early Book Society 2 (1999): 26–45 at 28.

12  Seinte Marharete þe Meiden ant Martyr: Re-edited from MS. Bodley 34, Oxford, and MS. Royal 17A. XXVII, British Museum, ed. Frances M. Mack, EETS o.s. 193 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), hereafter SM, 12, ll. 17–19. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

13  “leðeren (v.),” The Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, 2013, online at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med, hereafter MED. In Seinte Katerine, the saint’s “leofliche lich liðerede al [o] blode” (lovely body lathered all in blood), in Seinte Katerine: Re-edited from MS Bodley 34 and the Other Manuscripts, ed. S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne and E. J. Dobson, EETS s.s. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), hereafter SK, 80, ll. 566–67. In Seinte Iuliene, they “leggen se luðerliche on hire leofliche lich þet hit liðeri o blode” (beat so wickedly her lovely body that it lathered in blood), in Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, ed. S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne, EETS o.s. 248 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), hereafter SI, 15.

14  Although “leðer” has more literary appearances from the fourteenth century onward, it does appear in several passages of Ancrene Wisse, see “leðer (n.),” MED. 15  SK 6, l. 37; 8, ll. 38–40.

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wealthy laity—those likely to own the Katherine Group codices (including anchoresses)—the understanding of documentary authority and textual authenticity naturally developed over time through their interactions with multiple types of documents and textual exchanges. In From Memory to Written Record, Michael Clanchy argues, “Among the laity, or more specifically among the knights and country gentry in the first instance, confidence in written record was neither immediate nor automatic. Trust in writing and understanding of what it could—and could not—achieve developed from growing familiarity with documents.”16 Through their interactions with multiple types of written documents, the laity learned to trust (and also to manipulate) the authority of the written word. Spiritual authorities, of course, could play a major role in the laity’s perception of textual authority. When addressing the Eastern masters, Katherine contrasts pagan and Christian literature, describing the physical features of pagan books as glistening and attractive but ultimately empty of meaning.17 This later speech repeats the Scriptural theme of Katherine’s sermon which the saint first introduced when she proclaimed: “Perdam sapientiam sapientum et intellectum intelligentium reprobabo, ‘Ich chulle fordo þe wisdom of þeos wise worldmen,’ he seið, ‘ant awarpen þe wit of þeose world-witti’” (I will reject the wisdom of the wise and the intelligence of the intelligent. ‘I will destroy the wisdom of these wise worldly men,’ he says, ‘and defeat the wit of those wise to the world’).18 Reminding the audience of the Scriptural theme of the legend—1 Corinthians 1:19, which quotes from Isaiah 29:4—which concerns the opposition between spiritual and earthly wisdom, Katherine articulates the issue in concrete rather than abstract terms by referencing the material form of this knowledge. The pagan codex contains “alle þe glistinde wordes […] þe beoð wiðuten godlec ant empti wiðinnen” (all those glistening words […] which are without goodness and empty within),19 and the books of Homer, Aristotle, Asclepius, Galen, Philistion, and Plato are all characterized as crafty and deceptive, not sources upon which one would want to lean for support in an argument (“al þes writers writes þet ȝe wreoðieð ow on” [all these writers’ writings that you rely upon)).20 While Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson translate “wreoðieð” as “leaning” upon, the play of alliteration further links the physical marks of writing to words as a source of support and earthly authority.21 “Wreoðien” derives from the Old English verb “wreþian,” which the Bosworth–Toller dictionary defines as “prop, stay, sup-

16  Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), 2. 17  SK 44, ll. 308–11; 46, ll. 312–25; 48, ll. 326–27. Passage missing from Bodley beginning in the middle of the Latin quotation supplied from Royal, fol. 20r, in the edition. 18  SK 26, ll. 177–79. 19  SK 44, ll. 310–11.

20  SK 46, ll. 317–18.

21  The Katherine Group. MS Bodley 34: Religious Writings for Women in Medieval England, ed. and trans. Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Ann Robertson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), p. 37, 21.2.

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port, sustain,” but in its Middle English usage in this passage, “wreoðien” relates to textual support, “to rely (on God or a written authority).”22 While Katherine rejects the diverting allure of secular romances and pagan codices, she directs the reader to rely instead upon physical documents—Bibles as well as saints’ lives—that bear the marks of Christian truth. Seinte Margarete will develop this instruction further by providing itself as an example of spiritually salubrious reading material.23 Books were precious objects available to few, but in the vernacular especially, these texts were beginning to make their way into the hands of the laity, a group relatively unfamiliar with the written word.24 Wealthy Marcher families are likely non-anchoritic owners of these Early Middle English manuscripts. McAvoy demonstrates the outsized influence of dowager noblewomen in the unstable region along the Welsh border, and Dorothy Kim shows how the martial imagery of the Katherine Group allowed English female readers to participate vicariously in the Crusades.25 Books were clearly reaching new hands and fulfilling new purposes during this time. The Katherine Group passages instructing readers and listeners about what sorts of documents to trust may reflect clerical concerns about the priest’s and the Church’s authority and ability to shape their audience’s education and behaviour. At the same time, as Williams Boyarin has shown and I will discuss below, Seinte Margarete evades this control by proclaiming a flesh-centred authority; the codex authorizes itself as an apotropaic object. The codex-as-relic calls to mind another corpus whose spiritual power depends on the transformation of female flesh: the body of the anchoress. The anchoress gains authority in the community by sealing off her flesh and becoming a living relic within her cell. Although Ancrene Wisse features “a relentless foregrounding of the female body as malign influence,” McAvoy and other scholars have shown how such “allegorized cultural narratives […] can offer up more subversive and heterodox readings than were initially envisaged by the author himself.”26 The Katherine Group grounds its material aesthetic in subversively affirmative notions of the anchoritic female body. As indicated by the many clerical admonishments against the practice, lay people visited anchoresses for advice and instruction.27 Referring 22  See definition b of “wreoðien (v.),” MED; see “wreþian” in Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller, ed., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898).

23  In an intertextual connection between two works of the “Ancrene Wisse Group,” the anchoritic rule mentions the audience’s familiarity with Ruffin, “Beliales broðer” and the demon who appears in “ower Englische boc of Seinte Margarete” (AW 4.55.930–32, p. 93). 24  Even when analyzing these texts in the narrower anchoritic context, we must remember that many anchoresses did not take religious vows and had led most of their lives as lay people, not professional religious.

25  McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms, 151; see Dorothy Kim, “Rewriting Liminal Geographies: Crusader Sermons, the Katherine Group, and the Scribe of MS Bodley 34,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 42, no. 1 (2016): 56–78. 26  McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms, 93, 101.

27  In one example, the fifteenth-century Middle English translator of Speculum inclusorum warns

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to “society’s own need for an anchorite within its religious system,” McAvoy argues that anchoritic literature met a new literary demand: “The rapid and relatively widespread adaptation of anchoritic texts for use by an increasingly literate laity would suggest a need for a body of literature which remained firmly ideologically anchoritic in tone and content but which also occupied a ‘middle ground’ between a monastic, Latinate reading environment and the world of a primarily visual or auditory literacy.”28 Physical accessibility enabled the anchoress’s societal function as mediator or even textual centre. Anchorites’ cells were centrally located, as Michelle M. Sauer explains: Anchorites resided in small cells often attached to churches but also built on or near chapels in gates or on bridges, constructed as freestanding structures in churchyards, or created in unusual spaces such as underneath chapels and above church rafters. Topographically, these are all somewhat central locations. Churches were both spiritual and social centers of the medieval village, and the other places for cells were all public social areas.29

The geographic and social centrality as well as the religious authority of anchorites allowed Early Middle English literature to spread to lay audiences, effectively shaping the imagery and methods of lay spirituality, vernacular literacy, and trust in documentary authority.

Flesh: Leaf and Belief

Seinte Margarete presents its text as authoritative by linking the veracity of the saint’s story to the physical existence of writings about her. Tectinus, the author/ narrator in the Latin version of Margaret’s life, becomes Teochimus in the Early Middle English text. The Katherine Group version is inconsistent: Teochmius is first presented as an adapter and later as the eyewitness and author of the text. In the Latin version determined to be the most similar to the source for the Middle English legend, Tectinus appears as a well-read man who preserves Margaret’s prayers and the events of her martyrdom for the Christian faithful.30 As the prologue moves anchorites that lay people enjoy frequenting anchoritic cells to spread gossip and bawdy rumours, polluting their minds with sinful thoughts (see Speculum inclusorum / A Mirror for Recluses: A Late Medieval Guide for Anchorites and its Middle English Translation, ed. E. A. Jones (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), Mirror I.ii.57–65, pp. 11–13). 28  McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms, 93, 109.

29  Michelle M. Sauer, “Introduction: Anchoritism, Liminality, and the Boundaries of Vocational Withdrawal,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 42, no. 1 (2016): v–xii at vi.

30  The EETS Seinte Margarete volume includes an edition of the Latin legend from London, British Library, Harley MS 2801 emended with London, British Library, Harley MS 5327. Neither of these manuscripts represents the direct source for the Early Middle English legend. Mack, the editor of SM, explains that the (now missing) Latin source derives from the Mombritius version of St. Margaret, which I have quoted here. Boninus Mombritius, “Passio sanctæ Margaritæ virginis et martyris,” Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum, novam hanc editionem, 2 vols. (Paris: Fontemoing, 1910), 2:190–96 at 2:190, l. 22. While we know that the source of Seinte Margarete is of the Latin

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from the events of Christ’s life to Margaret’s imitation of him, Tectinus says that he “wrote everything which happened to the most blessed Margaret” (scripsi omnia quae passa est beatissima Margarita).31 In the Early Middle English, however, Teochmius is not initially described as the primary author of the legend. Instead of saying “I wrote everything” (scripsi omnia), Teochimus tells his audience that he “biȝet hit iwriten of þe writers þa, al hire passiun” (acquired that which was written by the writers then, all her passion).32 By mentioning the existence of source material, Teochimus enhances the legitimacy of the legend. This modification perhaps reflects contemporary writing practices in which authorship—especially of saints’ lives—is a matter of adaptation. The work of adaptation is not simple, however, and Matthew Fisher has argued that individual manuscript copies of “derivative texts,” such as chronicles, can in some cases be analyzed in terms of “scribal authorship,” taking into account the historical specificities of each stage in the text’s transmission: “Copying takes place within specific historical moments, and as such is shaped by and shapes the particularities of those circumstances. Copying is a motivated act, an act creating a new text that duplicates, replicates, resembles, or recalls an existing text.”33 Through its revision of the original, the Early Middle English characterizes literary truth and authority as verified by the touch of people who were there with the saint during her martyrdom. Teochimus deems his text authoritative based on its proximity to a holy body. At the conclusion, the Early Middle English legend reverts to the Latin story, in which Teochimus is not merely an adapter but rather an eyewitness and the original author. Teochimus again speaks, now claiming that he is the person who bore Margaret’s body to her grandmother Clete’s home in the city of Antioch. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne notes that narrators of saints’ lives often construct their authority in relation to both textual witnesses and bodily contact with the saint: “Body-centred modes of participation in textual communities are so validated a form of relation that clerical narrators seek them, authenticating themselves by contact with the corpse as well as with the corpus of documentation to the saint.”34 The character of Teochmius seeks to guarantee the legitimacy of Margaret’s relics as well as “Mombritius type,” it is important to remember that the Mombritius version is not a “fixed entity.” See Gordon Hall Gerould, “A New Text of the Passio S. Margaritae with Some Account of Its Latin and English Relations,” PMLA 39 (1924): 525–56 at 526. On the relationship between the Katherine Group legends and their Latin sources, see also Theodor Wolpers, Die englische Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters: Eine Formgeschichte des Legendenerzählens von der spätantiken lateinischen Tradition bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts, Anglia 10 (Tübingen: Neimeyer, 1964). 31  Mombritius, “Passio sanctae Margaritae,” 190, ll. 22 and 27–28. 32  SM 4, ll. 4–5.

33  Matthew Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 15.

34  Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “The Apple’s Message: Some Post-Conquest Hagiographic Accounts of Textual Transmission,” in Late Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. A. J. Minnis, York Manuscript Conferences: Proceedings Series 3 (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1994), 39–53 at 46.

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the narrative itself, and in turn, his contact with the saint’s body and documentary evidence about her life establishes the legend’s authority. The use of the first-person is another means by which the author emphasizes Teochimus’s closeness to the saint. In Seinte Margarete, Teochmius explains that he copied down her prayers as she spoke them in her cell: “hire bonen þat ha bed wrat o boc-felle, ant hire lif-lade al lette don o leaue, ant sende hit soðliche iwriten wide ȝont te worlde” (her prayers that she prayed I wrote down on book-skin, and her entire life I let down on a leaf, and I sent it truly written wide throughout the world).35 In the Early Middle English, Teochimus does not emphasize his own wit (astutia) as an author, but instead argues for his text’s authority through his physical proximity to the saint’s voice and corpse. In addition to the authenticity granted to Teochimus through his physical contact with the saint’s body and her relics, the legend associates “leave” with belief and truth with the written word, authorizing Margaret’s story through its association with an eyewitness account and documentary evidence of the physical contact between narrator and subject. The author of Seinte Margarete modified the Latin to underscore the reliability of the narrator and to define for the reader what makes a vernacular text trustworthy—its fleshly connection to a holy body. While the Latin references “omnes carthas” (many pages), the Middle English describes “moni misliche leaf” that Teochimus read.36 Here, the word “leaf,” of course, means “a leaf of a book, page, sheet.”37 At this time, the most common usage indicated a leaf of a tree or other plant. This instance of “leaf” as “page” is one of the earliest in the English language, with earlier extant appearances only in Laȝamon’s Brut, an Old English Rule of St. Benedict, and an Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.38 Using “leaf ” in this passage not only authorizes Margaret’s story through Teochimus’s familiarity with many books, but also it draws the listener’s attention to the aural similarity between words describing the written word and belief/believing in a similar manner to “leðeren” and “leðer.” While we might not notice this similarity because of the “be” prefix, the earlier form of our modern English verb “to believe” survived until the late Middle Ages, meaning that the verb “ileven” and the noun “ileve” sounded quite similar to the word “leaf.”39 In the context of oral delivery, this similarity would be particularly noticeable. We have manuscript evidence that indicates memorial 35  SM 52, ll. 28–30. 36  SM 2, ll. 13–15.

37  See definition 2a of “lef (n.),” MED.

38  See definition 2a of “lef (n.),” MED; definition II.5 of “leaf, n.1,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

39  The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “The original gelefan, ileven, ileve, survived to the 14th c., and the shortened leve to the 15th; the present compound, which eventually superseded both, appears in the 12th” (“believe, v.,” OED, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 2nd ed., 20 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], vol. 2, 86–87). Also, “the orig. geleafa, ileafe, ileve, and its short form leafa, leafe, leve, survived till the 13th c., when the present compound, which had appeared already in the 12th c., superseded both” (“belief, n.,” OED, 2nd ed., vol. 2, 86). See “ileven (v.(2))” and “ileve (n.(2))” in the MED.

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transmission and thus suggests oral delivery, perhaps to audiences who were not capable of independent reading nor wealthy enough to obtain their own copies. This sound association between “leaf” and “belief” is not merely an accident of alliteration; it effectively instructs the audience about the reliability of documents that have been touched or verified by an authority figure and reinforces their effect. In terms of practical advice, Seinte Margarete marks saints’ lives and Scripture as “safe” reading material. While Seinte Katerine demands that audiences reject pagan books, Seinte Margarete elevates Christian writings through their connection with priestly authority and their presentation of codices as relics. Before her beheading, Margaret prays for several protections for her devotees, including the forgiveness of sins for those who obtain a copy of her life.40 Margaret rewards reading as well as listening to the story of her life, but she also explicitly mentions holding the codex in one’s hands, associating the touching of books with a sort of talismanic power often associated with relics.41

Anchoritic Literary Culture and the Saint’s Body as Textual Relic

During the saint’s tortures, Margaret’s body—even while alive—appears as a textual relic in the making. This is not unlike the rhetorical and theological conceptualization of the anchoress’s body and enclosure as relic and reliquary that Michelle M. Sauer explores in her article in this volume. In addition to Seinte Margarete’s word-play on “leaf” in the earlier passage, Teochimus describes the “boc felle” on which he records Margaret’s prayers.42 “Book-skin” refers to a physical object (the vellum in a codex), but elsewhere in the legend, the saint’s body appears as if a book, her skin as a writing surface. Her body becomes a book through her miraculous tortures. This process begins through her similitude to a lamb. Margaret first appears in a field tending her sheep when her suitor Olibrius spots her shimmering and shining beautifully (“þe schimede ant schan”).43 As the pagan desires to obtain Margaret as his own, Margaret prays to God and likens herself to a hunted animal: For ich iseo me, lauerd, bistepped ant bistonden ase lomb wið wedde wulues, ant ase þe fuhel þe is iuon in þes fuheleres grune, ase fisc a-hon on hoke, ase ra inumen i nette.44

40  SM 46, ll. 26–31.

41  Don C. Skemer notes that this passage with its emphasis on the “amuletic possibilities of her passion” appears in early copies of the Mombritius version as well as both Old English lives of St. Margaret, which are based on the Mombritius version and appear in London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A. iii and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 303; see Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 240. 42  See 7a of “bok (n.(1)),” MED for compounds including “boc-felle.” 43  SM 6, l. 11.

44  SM 8, ll. 7–10. Once more, Margaret compares herself to a lamb, calling herself “mi lauerdes lomb” as she extricates herself from the demon’s clutches (SM 28, l. 25).

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For I see myself, lord, attacked and beset like a lamb among savage wolves, and like the bird that is caught in the fowler’s snare, like a fish hung on a hook, like a roe deer captured in a net.

By presenting herself as an animal, a sacrifice, Margaret imitates Christ, of course, but she also aligns herself with the animals who provide the material support for her legend. Interestingly, Margaret’s characterization of herself as a lamb evokes legal rather than literary manuscript culture. While most literary and religious manuscripts were made of cow skin, legal documents were written on sheep skin.45 Calfskin worked well for literary manuscripts which might require correction and erasure, but sheep skin was the preferred medium for legal documents, guaranteeing that the document could not be modified without notice.46 The characterization of Margaret’s body as a lamb implies the authenticity of the saint’s legend by associating her body with the material for a legal document, even though Seinte Margarete was written on calfskin. The resulting association of Margaret’s legend with legal documentary culture guarantees the reliability of the narrative metaphorically inscribed on Margaret’s own (sheep)skin, which is doubly verified by its written record on vellum. By associating authenticity with material proof, the scribe (and/or preacher who delivers the legend) seeks to maintain his authorizing influence on reading material. The body-book relic the legend generates, however, also undermines clerical authority. Williams Boyarin argues: If we can imagine that Margaret’s body is a text […] then the skin on which the vita is written can be, literally, a relic of her body. As this gives a startlingly equal amount of power to the saint’s body and the boc of pine, it also transcends such devotional categories and practices in a potentially subversive way. […] The imagined power and authority of the vita, its complex interpretive possibilities and related opportunities for meditation on Christian suffering, depends both on its relationship to the physical body (the relic) and on the idea that […] Margaret’s body becomes, through its very physicality and torment, an inscribed, authorized, and authorizing text.47

The resemblance between book and body challenges the author’s ability to maintain his control over the text and its use. The author seems aware of the tensions this creates, perhaps related to contemporary preachers’ concerns about their position in society when viewed as one profession among many.48 At the same time, the mate45  Nancy K. Turner, “The Materiality of Medieval Parchment: A Response to ‘The Animal Turn,’” Revista Hispánica Moderna 71, no. 1 (2018): 39–67 at 46.

46  Turner, “The Materiality of Medieval Parchment,” 46; Turner cites Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 121: “According to the Dialogue of the Exchequer, ‘it is not easy to make an erasure on sheep skin without it showing plainly,’ a quality that was seen as desirable for legal writs as evidence of tampering would be immediately visible.” 47  Williams Boyarin, “Sealed Flesh, Book-Skin,” 106.

48  Sermones ad status emerged in the twelfth and flourished in the thirteenth century; by addressing audiences according to professional or social status, these sermons provoked anxieties about how preachers fit into this newly conceived social scheme (see Claire M. Waters, “The Labor of Aedificatio and the Business of Preaching in the Thirteenth Century,” Viator 38, no. 1 (2007):

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rial metaphors throughout bolster the authority of the anchoress as the centre of an ephemeral textual community. Seinte Margarete allows private readers to utilize a text imbued with talismanic power through its physical form, thus offering readers access to a self-authorizing relic that stands outside the ambit of Church authority. Margaret’s tortures develop the body-as-book metaphor through a series of images associated with book-making. While the dragon-demon licks the hard skin of her heels, he is unable to mar her body: Ant te drake reasde to hire mit tet ilke, ant sette his sariliche muð, ant unmeaðlich muchel, on heh on hire heaued, ant rahte ut his tunge to þe ile of hire helen, ant swengde hire in, ant forswelh into his wide wombe: ah Criste to wurðmund ant him to wraðer-heale.49

And the dragon rushed to her at that very moment,50 and set his horrible and immensely large mouth up high above her head, and stretched out his tongue to the hard skin of her heels, and swung her in and swallowed her into his wide stomach, but [this was all] honour to Christ and destruction to him.

Chosen as a martyr, Margaret’s body is transformed for God’s purposes and not by the devil’s attempts to tempt her. The saint’s body is miraculously impenetrable, protected by the sign of the cross, Christ’s intervention, and the hardness of her skin.51 The passage makes a spectacle of Margaret’s body, as the dragon’s tongue extends along her entire body from head to foot. The scene describes Margaret emerging miraculously unscathed from the dragon’s stomach. The skin of her heels provides a barrier against the dragon’s touch; “ile” refers to “calloused skin” or here, more specifically, “the calloused underside of the heel.”52 The tactile description of the saint’s skin encourages the manuscript user to engage with the legend through the sense of touch, as the reader’s own hands touch the aged, treated skin of the manuscript folio. Throughout Seinte Margarete, the skin and body of the saint are likened to the vellum and textual corpus of the manuscript, respectively. Thus, the sensorially evocative image of hardened skin could metaphorically direct the reader to the treated animal skin on which the legend is written, and at the conclusion of the legend, that very vellum will be said to have magical properties.53 167–89, especially 180). Given that the sources of Hali Meiðhad (Holy Maidenhood) include the model sermons of Gregory the Great and those of Alan of Lille in his Summa de arte praedicatoria, the author(s) of the Katherine Group works—whoever they were—were familiar with contemporary trends in pastoral literature. On the sources for Hali Meiðhad, see Bella Millett, “Hali Meiðhad, Sawles Warde, and the Continuity of English Prose,” in Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson, ed. Eric Gerald Stanley and Douglas Gray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100–14, especially 103–4, and Bella Millett, “The Ancrene Wisse Group,” A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 1–18 at 9. 49  SM 24, ll. 9–14.

50  See definition 2b of “ilk (pron.),” MED. 51  SM 24, ll. 9–14.

52  “ile (n. (3)),” MED. The word comes from Old English “ile” for “hard skin” or the “sole of the foot” (see Bosworth–Toller).

53  For a discussion of the “divine essence” of vellum, see Michelle M. Sauer, “Touching Jesus: Christ’s

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Seinte Margarete promises special attention for those who own or touch a book of her life near the end of the Early Middle English narrative. During Margaret’s prayer, she requests that anyone who writes a book of her life, buys a copy of her legend, holds or touches a copy often, or reads or listens to her legend be forgiven of all their sins.54 The passage indicates the author’s expectation for multiple contexts and audiences for the saint’s life, including private readers as well as communal listeners, and the literary and manuscript evidence indicates that these texts circulated through preachers’ voices as well as anchoresses’ hands. The saint’s promises encourage the copying of her text, the reproduction of her book and thus her body. James of Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend, ca. 1260; James, ca. 1228–1298) version of St. Margaret’s life also features a promise of the saint’s intercession for her devotees: “She asked for time to pray, and prayed devoutly for herself and her persecutors and for all who would honor her memory and invoke her.”55 While it promotes Margaret’s cult, the Golden Legend version of her life does not emphasize the physical reproduction of her legend and the codicological power associated with the text. In Seinte Margarete, the author reinforces the saint’s (and her books’) power through the promise of a heavenly visitor. Near the end of the legend, a dove descends from heaven, giving assurances to Margaret’s followers about the efficacy of devotion to her. Responding to Margaret’s request in the prayer above, the dove speaks, promising to banish all devils from buildings where her legend is copied56 and explaining that anyone who kisses a codex of Margaret’s legend will have his sins forgiven: “Hwer-se-eauer þi bodi oðer ei of þine ban beon, oðer boc of þi pine, cume þe sunfule mon ant legge his muð þer-up-on, ich salui him his sunnen” (Wherever your body or any of your bones are, or a book of your pain, if the sinful man comes and lays his mouth upon it, I shall heal him of his sins).57 These assurances appealed to John, a scribe of the Royal manuscript. As one of the three scribes of Royal, John hopes to benefit from the power of the codex he wrote and the prayers of future users of the manuscript. He addresses the reader, “hwa se þis writ haueð ired” (whoever has read this writing), and requests “par seinte charite biddeð a pater noster for Iohan þat þeos boc writ” (for St. Charity, pray an Our Father for John who wrote this book).58 While some of these passages purposefully limit the Side Wound and Medieval Manuscript Tradition,” in Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon, University of Surrey, January 5, 2016, http://blogs.surrey.ac.uk/medievalwomen/2016/01/05/ touching-jesus-christs-side-wound-medieval-manuscript-tradition/. 54  SM 78, ll. 18–22.

55  James of Voragine (Jacobus de Voragine), “93. Saint Margaret,” in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:368–70 at 370; “De Sancta Margarita,” Legenda Aurea, Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Florence: SISMEL, 1998), 616–20 at 619: “Illa autem impetrato orandi spatio pro se et suis persecutoribus necnon et pro eius memoriam agentibus et se inuocantibus deuote orauit.” 56  SM 48, ll. 22–24. 57  SM 48, ll. 20–22.

58  Royal MS, fol. 10v; transcription and translation my own. On the French phrase “par seinte charite” as an instance of code-switching, see Janne Skaffari, “Lexical Borrowings in Early Middle

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reading material for the audience, the copyists of the legend also seek personal spiritual benefit for writing the book, fashioning a sort of relic. The legend itself encourages its own reproduction through promises about the codex’s apotropaic effects. While the legend instructs readers about which books to trust, in stressing the documentary authority of Margaret’s book, the author seemingly releases this legend for adaptation and deployment in private as well as communal contexts and perhaps for the anchoress’s own use in teaching.

Circulation: Orality, Ephemerality, and Codicology

The study of anchoritic literature is typically siloed from the mainstream of English literary studies due to the perception of limited circulation and thus limited impact on larger communities of readers. Circulation ought not be deemed the only or even primary criterion for literary importance (and certainly it’s not—we all frequently read the one-witness Beowulf with students), but it is important to note that the Early Middle English manuscript evidence does indicate wider circulation both in codices and via ephemeral modes such as booklets and memorial transmission.59 Studies of formal scribal cultures do not account for the impact of anchorites and lay people upon the circulation of Early Middle English literature. According to Anne Savage, Ancrene Wisse “was written both about and with these anchoresses,” and it should be deemed communally authored because of the influence these anchoresses had on their own advice literature.60 Ancrene Wisse was revised within five years of its initial composition for an audience that had grown sevenfold from an initial group of three, the revision supporting Savage’s collaborative vision of anchoritic literary culture.61 Cate Gunn and others have demonstrated the widespread adaptation of anchoritic literature for lay audiences in the final centuries of the Middle Ages,62 and below I gather traces of wider ephemeral circulation within the thirteenth century. All three extant Katherine Group manuscripts are separated from each other by at least one intermediate manuscript, meaning that more copies of these works existed in the thirteenth century.63 As a result, no version of the five texts is a direct descendant of any other extant version. While fragmentary, the history of transmisEnglish Religious Discourse: A Case Study of Sawles Warde,” in Discourse Perspectives on English: Medieval to Modern, ed. Risto Hiltunen and Janne Skaffari (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003), 77–104, especially 96–97.

59  Wogan-Browne notes, also, that many textual artifacts of women’s religious culture were perishable by design, as in the case of talismanic pregnancy girdles inscribed with saints’ lives, in “The Apple’s Message,” 53.

60  Anne Savage, “The Communal Authorship of Ancrene Wisse,” in Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), 45–55 at 46. 61  McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms, 150.

62  Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). 63  The EETS introductions remain the best sources on textual transmission, although some conclusions have been modified by more recent articles.

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sion gives us a fascinating glimpse into the multiple ways in which Early Middle English texts circulated. The textual history of Seinte Iuliene is the most complicated. In her edition of the life, Simonne R. T. O. d’Ardenne argued for a complex process of transmission that involved at least five steps. Bella Millett, however, resolved some of the issues with d’Ardenne’s theory by positing oral transmission on the Royal manuscript branch. One or more versions lie between the Bodley and Royal texts and their presumed shared exemplar, and at a stage before Royal’s direct source, the text of Seinte Iuliene was memorized and orally transmitted.64 InnesParker argued “that prayers and meditations like those of the Wooing Group circulated far more widely on scrolls or individual leaves and in booklets than the more sturdy surviving manuscripts can bear witness to”; likewise, the Katherine Group manuscripts also bear evidence of wider ephemeral circulation.65 For one example, the memorial transmission and presumed oral delivery of Seinte Iuliene documents the circulation of anchoritic literature outside the codex, in the minds and mouths of medieval people, even after the texts were first written down. The missing manuscripts in stemma codicae, memorial transmission, and the unavailability of exemplars all indicate that the Katherine Group circulated in multiple modes and textual communities. The Titus manuscript does not feature a regular quire structure, and the use of single leaves and variable quire sizes suggests that the scribe “completed” the manuscript several times, creating customized quires (in order to accommodate the length of the text exactly) on several different occasions.66 Demonstrating that the codicological structure indicates several bouts of copying and “four or five” points at which the manuscript was considered “finished,” Ralph Hanna points out the “piecemeal acquisition” of exemplars for the Titus manuscript.67 The Titus scribe had to wait for copies of desired works to arrive, suggesting both regional circulation and sporadic availability despite consumer demand. As Innes-Parker has suggested, perhaps this vernacular literature 64  Bella Millett, “The Textual Transmission of Seinte Iuliene,” Medium Ævum 59 (1990): 41–54 at 50: “I would suggest that, at some point in the line of transmission leading to R, a text of Seinte Iuliene was memorized for public performance, probably—given the greater remoteness of the R text from the Latin source and its preservation of some errors in the common ancestor of B and R—by someone other than the author. The memorization was competent enough (the sequence of phrases is usually preserved, and some parts of the text—perhaps because they were more frequently in demand—are quite closely reproduced), but the nature of the variants suggests both that the reciter’s memory sometimes faltered, and that he supplemented it by a process of partial recomposition, of the kind found in the orally transmitted verse texts.”

65  Innes-Parker, “Reading and Devotional Practice,” 138. For more on the manuscript evidence of the Wooing Group and what it reveals about anchoritic literary culture, see Catherine InnesParker, “Anchoritic Textual Communities and the Wooing Group Prayers,” in Medieval Anchorites in Their Communities, ed. Cate Gunn, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Catherine Innes-Parker (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2017), 167–82, especially 172–75. 66  See Ralph Hanna, “Lambeth Palace Library MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenth-Century Textual Transmission,” Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2009), 78–88. 67  Hanna, “Lambeth Palace,” 87.

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was easier to obtain in informal anchoritic-lay circles than it was in formal, clerical ones. Several other pieces of evidence indicate that these works circulated in bits and pieces as well as full manuscripts. Bodley is missing three folios from Seinte Katerine which contain the most basic theological instruction in her legend. The Bodley scribe also switches exemplars for Seinte Margarete after copying the first few folios from a different source.68 Apparently, the preferred source text was not immediately available to the scribe. This manuscript evidence indicates that the Katherine Group must have been in even wider circulation in the thirteenth-century West Midlands than the mere three remaining witnesses might at first suggest.69 With their physical restriction to their cells and their liturgically inscribed death, anchorites certainly seem isolated from the rest of the medieval world, but they continued to participate in their communities, sometimes giving advice to laypeople and taking part in a “culture of visitation” explored by Joshua S. Easterling in his article in this volume. Margery Kempe’s visit to Julian of Norwich is one later example of a medieval laywoman seeking an anchoress for spiritual education and advice (Margery, ca. 1373–after 1438; Julian, 1343–after 1416). Some anchoresses were responsible for the instruction of their servants, who usually lived in a separate room next to the anchorhold.70 Part I of Ancrene Wisse says that the anchoress should instruct her servants in the afternoon,71 and Part VIII addresses the anchoress’s role as a teacher, particularly to her servants, saying “bi hire meistres read ha mei sum rihten ant helpen to learen” (though on her director’s advice she may offer someone guidance and help with learning).72 The command of Ælred of Rievaulx (1110/12–1167) in his twelfth-century De institutione inclusarum (Rule for a Recluse) not to turn the “ancre-hus to childrene scole” (anchor-house into a children’s school) may suggest that very thing had happened in the past.73 While the authors of anchoritic guides are careful to limit the anchoress’s role as a teacher, within this context, the rather basic theological instruction of the Katherine Group 68  See LAEME entry for Bodley.

69  On that note, it seems likely to me that the texts may have been copied into an even greater variety of groupings than in the three extant manuscripts.

70  See Innes-Parker, “Anchoritic Textual Communities and the Wooing Group Prayers,” 175, for a discussion of the role of anchoresses’ maids in the potential circulation of manuscripts between recluses; Innes-Parker notes that these “maids’ visits are frequent and important enough for the reviser to add a substantial passage” in the Corpus manuscript version of Ancrene Wisse.

71  Robert Hasenfratz, “Introduction,” in Ancrene Wisse, ed. Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 8. 72  AW 8.25.197–201, pp. 160–61; translation from Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), 161.

73  Ælredus Rieuallensis, De institutione inclusarum, ed. C. H. Talbot, in Ælredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, Corpus Christianorum continuation mediaeualis 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 637–82 at l. 115: Ælred is also concerned that “sunt quaedam inclusae quae docendis puellis occupantur, et cellam suam uertunt in scholam” (there are certain enclosed women who are occupied with teaching children, and they are turning their cell into a school). See discussion in Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 112–13. This instruction also appears in AW 8.25.

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could be put to another use. These Early Middle English works could function as teaching tools for the anchoress concerned about her servants’ and visitors’ theological education. Although we do not know when they were removed, three folios capturing the heart of the debate between Katherine and the pagan scholars were cut out of the Bodley manuscript.74 The locus of most of the basic theological instruction, Katherine’s speeches offer a summary of salvation history, including the events of Creation, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, and extended explanations of the dual nature of Christ and the forgiveness of sins through the Crucifixion. Perhaps such material was so in demand for lay instruction that a contemporary or near contemporary reader removed it for his or her own use.

Conclusion

Exploring the Katherine Group’s material aesthetic helps us understand how anchoritism shaped lay literacy and conceptions of documentary authority through multiple forms of textual circulation at a time of literary, religious, and historical transition. Codicological evidence demonstrates that anchoritic literature circulated more widely in the thirteenth century than the material traces at first suggest. The ephemerality and piecemeal nature of the Katherine Group’s material circulation—and its simultaneous power—reflected and drew upon the anchoress’s own authority and the “body-centred modes of participation in [this] textual communit[y].”75 Functioning in parallel to the saint’s skin-relic-codex, the anchoress’s body provided a textual centre which legitimated vernacular texts circulating outside clerical textual networks.

74  This passage corresponds to SK 46–66, ll. 325–460, which is missing from the Bodley manuscript and thus supplied from Royal. The missing folios of Bodley were certainly removed before modern foliation was inserted, since the three missing folios were once between those currently numbered 7v and 8r. 75  Wogan-Browne, “The Apple’s Message,” 46.

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Jenny C. Bledsoe received her PhD in English from Emory University and is an Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Her research on Early Middle English, religious literature, and manuscript studies has appeared in New Medieval Literatures, the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Medieval Sermon Studies, Notes & Queries, and Pedagogy.

FRAMING MATERIALITY: RELIC DISCOURSE AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH ANCHORITISM MICHELLE M. SAUER*

One of the things I enjoy most about studying anchorites is the opportunity to tramp around the English countryside tracking down remnants of cells, documenting the spaces inhabited by the bodies of the people whose religious lives have left literary traces. Similarly, when I introduce a class to the study of relics, I tend to start by telling them that relics are often “pieces of saints.” This is not to be flippant, but rather to drive home the fact that in medieval Christianity, relics, or at least first-class relics, are fragmented bodies—parts that come to represent the whole, just as the remains of anchorholds represent, at least to some extent, the whole vocation. It is important to feel close to the subject, to immerse myself in the “matter” that makes up the normally intangible religious subjects I explore. As Alexandra Walsham notes, “the study of material objects offers an alternative perspective from which to analyze the societies that produced and consumed them.”1 Material objects almost have agency themselves, and they certainly invite responses from audiences with whom they physically interact. They can invoke memory, encourage participation, and reconstruct cultural moments. Relics, of course, which are simultaneously religious artifacts and secular objects offer these same opportunities. Relics, broadly understood, offer two dimensions of analysis that must be considered at the same time: on the one hand as a body; on the other hand, as an object or perhaps more precisely, an artifact. I say “artifact” because they are crafted objects, bodies changed into things via human modification, with the qualities of artifacts—design concept, material selections, manufacturing standards, and distribution patterns. Concentrating on the materiality of relics, then, allows us to consider relics not only as religious objects, but also as social objects that express cultural beliefs. Relics and reliquaries were core parts of medieval Christian piety, and the cult of saints was infused throughout Western society. Due to their centrality, relics offer glimpses at a range of material, social, and cultural phenomena related to medieval embodiment. As Julia M. H. Smith notes, “these stones and bones cannot be fitted into a world view which sunders materiality and belief, or enforces a rigid distinction between subject and object, or between object and thing.”2 Relics throw into *  My thanks to the peer reviewers of this volume, and most especially to my co-editor, Jenny C. Bledsoe, for the revision suggestions provided. As well, I appreciate the various audiences who have provided feedback on the various inceptions of this essay, including the initial version presented at the “Making Early Middle English” conference in 2016.

1  Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Relics and Remains,” Past and Present 206, supp. 5 (2010): 9–36 at 17. 2  Julia M. H. Smith, “Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c. 700–1200),” Proceedings

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sharp focus some of the conceptual boundaries of life, death, and life-after-death. Rather than being a memento mori, relics might mark the continued existence of the body to which they once belonged, proving they still remain with the community. They serve as reminders that “the body is a thing among things,” as Peter Brown says, or even a container for things.3 In that spirit, I wish to explore a possibility of relics as not being simply parts of dead people, but rather being the whole of quasi-living people (anchorites), albeit people who inhabit a space of death even while still dwelling on earth. As the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) bluntly points out, a “smiret ancre” (anointed anchoress) is an “ancre biburiet” (buried anchoress), because “hwet is ancre-hus bute hire burinesse?” (what is an anchorhold but her grave?).4 Although technically alive, anchorites abide as if dead. Relics work as traces of a life and body completed and disappeared, in this sense something like last words, but they also serve as frames or fragments of the moment of loss. Relic collection further shows a willingness to dwell with the moment of loss itself, to linger over evidence of death’s presence woven into the texture of life at all turns, but also to provide a bridge between the living and the dead. The relic makes apparent the poignancy of the body becoming object; it can re-enact that moment again and again. In this same volume, Jenny C. Bledsoe writes, “Going beyond codicological self-reference, the hagiographies collapse the distinction between the texts of the legends and the bodies of the saints.”5 Here I instead consider the collapse of the distinction between the still-living bodies of the anchorite and the similar corporeal remains of the saints. If, as Bledsoe suggests, the “codices are apotropaic objects,” what, then, are the living people and the stones that enclose them?

Talking about Relics

Relics are an object category found across time, geography, and culture, and found around the globe at all points in history. But in pre-Reformation Christian parlance, relics were sacramental objects that consist of the physical remains of saints (often parts of their bodies) or items related to or used by saints. In terms of canon of the British Academy 181 for 2010 (2012): 143–167 at 143. Smith credits the general idea to Caroline Walker Bynum in Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011).

3  Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4.

4  Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.896–97 at vol. 1, p. 43. Translations from Ancrene Wisse are all taken from Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), hereafter Guide. The anchoress was likened to “gold” earlier in this same passage, with the dangers of a sinful anchoress being referred to as “darkened gold.” 5  Jenny C. Bledsoe, “Materiality, Documentary Authority, and the Circulation of the Katherine Group,” Early Middle English 3, no. 1 (2021): 33–50 at 36.



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law, first-class relics were, and still are, actual fragments of the saint’s body (e.g., hair, teeth, bones) or instruments of a saint’s martyrdom, while books and other writings written by or copied by saints are second-class relics, as are items like a saint’s garments or religious ephemera such as rosaries and scapulars. Third-class relics are other artifacts that have come in contact with saints or their first-class relics (e.g., a linen cloth touched to a saint’s incorrupt heart).6 To some degree, the sense of relics also extends to holy sites.7 Relics serve as physical, tangible reminders of God’s power on earth, and an encounter with a relic is a devotional event. Medieval pilgrimages generally included visits to shrines and relics as well as holy spaces and places. This elaborate system of classification and the centrality of relics to pilgrimage and worship demonstrate their importance to the medieval Christian lived experience. In this essay, I will look at the anchoritic tradition in terms of Robyn Malo’s idea of relic discourse, with a particular focus on the anchorite as a living relic and the anchorhold as reliquary, although in anchoritic terms both body and cell are fused and interchangeable, so both anchorite and cell as relic and reliquary also often become interchangeable. Malo argues that as saints’ bodies became more and more elaborately enshrined, the language of hagiographies and other devotional writings, with their characteristic rhetoric of treasure and brightness, provided a substitute for direct experience of the relic. She notes that “the adornment of reliquaries is entirely incommensurate with what is inside. Translation and enshrinement thus efface what the relic has in common with the supplicant: the body, the inevitability of decay, and the promise of resurrection.”8 As well, she suggests that practices of enshrinement and translation of relics “are analogous to figurative language insofar as they present the signified (the relic) in terms of something else (the shrine).”9 Tropologically, the gilded or otherwise representational reliquary thus substitutes for the saint’s actual presence, yet at the same time fixes the saint’s identity within the reliquary itself. Therefore, relic discourse supplied access in writing, in texts wherein both saint and relic could be created and interpreted according to the literary custodians of relic, saint, shrine, and tradition. To this literary custodianship, we might add, also, the idea of enframement, since relics depend both on language and upon material circumstances. Seeta Chaganti’s concept of the poetics of enframement provides a useful beginning. She argues that “the reliquary offered a model of representational practice in which inscription and 6  See Eugene A. Dooley, Church Law on Sacred Relics, Canon Law Studies 70 (J.C.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1931), 4. 7  Robyn Malo discusses nineteenth-century canon law, which codifies two kinds of relics— notable and non-notable relics—and these categories can be seen to apply equally well to the types of relics that the proliferated in medieval Europe. See “The Pardoner’s Relics (and Why They Matter the Most),” The Chaucer Review 43, no. 1 (2008): 82–102. 8  Robyn Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 50. 9  Malo, Relics and Writing, 66.

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performance existed dialectically: while seeming to oscillate between these two modes, the reliquary in fact merged the two possibilities by allowing each to frame and enable the other.”10 Enshrinement, she posits, functioned not only as a broad cultural aesthetic uniting visual and verbal artifacts, but also as a visual form of language for expressing verbal processes of representation. And as Malo has demonstrated, relics and reliquaries needed narrative to be understood; their meaning inhered—in some instances, only inhered—in language. Cynthia Hahn clarifies that enframement “can be constituted by a number of practices including ritual, storytelling, or, most obviously, placing the valuable substance or object in a fitting container.” This renders the reliquary “not subsequent to but coterminous with the relic.”11 Coterminous essentially means having the same boundaries or extent in space, time, or meaning. Thus, more simplistically, Hahn suggests that the reliquary defines the relic by denoting it as valuable and worthy of preservation and reverence. In other words, the act of selection and subsequent enframement in some sense make the relic rather than the reverse. That Hahn deliberately chooses the terms “enframement” and “coterminous” to situate reliquaries within an art historical context is enlightening in an anchoritic perspective since both are terms used frequently in architecture. Most intriguingly, enframement has been used extensively in connection with the idea of “delayed space,” that is, the potential capacity to celebrate day-to-day activities and personal performance while simultaneously allowing for the commonplace character of the space to be transcended.12 And the anchoritic vocation, with its vow of “stude-steaðeluestnesse”13 (stability of abode), is both dependent upon and defined by its architectural boundaries. I suggest, then, that anchoritic literature, theology, and architecture deliberately employ certain words that are evocative of reliquaries as material substance in order to situate the anchorite as a living relic. Residing in an anchorhold, often snugly tucked up against the side of a church, the texts and traditions of anchoritism attest to the bodily and spiritual integrity of the anchorite within. It is the nature of relics to act as agents of continuity and of transmission—and as warriors of orthodoxy, anchorites act in a similar manner. If the normal workings of relic discourse render the invisible visible, representing a saint’s body indirectly since the body itself is outside of the line of sight, so, too, do anchoritic texts, especially the Rules and Forms of living, render an invisible practitioner visible, if only to the imagination, both medieval and modern. This coincides with relic terminology: a material fragment extracted from a disappeared body, the relic legitimizes a visibility of the hidden, just as anchorites, extracted from the Body of Christ (humankind) 10  Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 7. 11  Cynthia Hahn, Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art (New York: Leubsdorf Art Gallery, 2011), 9.

12  See, for example, Mohsen Mostafavi and Homa Fardjadi, Delayed Space: The Work of Homa Fardjadi and Mohsen Mostafavi (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). 13  Ancrene Wisse, “Prologue,” l. 65.



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legitimize withdrawal, reframing exiting the world as spiritual warriorship, not flight from temptation. Similarly, the value and worth of the practitioner is made clear through the use of specific metaphors, especially those focused on valuable substances. That is, the actual materials encode spiritual worth. Although relics are persistently material—both by definition (from the Latin reliquiae, or “remains”) as well as in basic understanding—the existence and importance of relics has more to do with operations of memory and selection than with any intrinsic worth of material things.

Anchorites and/as Relics

There are a number of characteristics that anchorites share with relics and/or reliquaries, thereby rendering them subject to relic discourse. For one thing, relics created a Christian landscape, and anchorites created networks of sanctity. We can think of both as expanding hierotopies. And with the expansion of territory, comes an increase in a town’s or a church’s importance, as well as an increased number of processions and festivals. Anchorites participate in similar spiritual economies, transactions, and expansions. Charles Freeman suggests that one early use of relics was not simply to spread faith, but also to expand Christian land mass. The relic trade, in essence, created a Christian landscape. Early Christianity valued the places where Jesus walked. But as the religion moved outward from Rome, these locations grew more and more distant. How could all of these disparate peoples be brought under one spatial umbrella, much as they had been gathered under a religious one? Translatio, the transferring of relics from one site to another, offered a solution. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (ca. 339–397) seized this opportunity with alacrity. Freeman notes, “Ambrose extended the range of gifts to include relics. […] [H]e sent off dust and bloodstains from the bodies [of martyrs] […] and inspired a network of elite relic collectors who reinforced each other’s collections. So here was a new explosion of holy sites, places that […] had had little or no contact with the events of Jesus’ life.”14 One of his group was Paulinus of Nola (ca. 354–431), who created a ritual for processing relics of oil and dust from St. Felix’s tomb (d. ca. 250), packaged them in small clay ampoules, and then passed these on to pilgrims, who in turn took them home, greatly expanding the Christian landscape. Paulinus notes, happily, that “wherever a drop of dew has fallen on man in the shape of a particle of bone, the tiny gift from a consecrated body, holy grace has […] brought forth rivers of life,”15 thereby transforming the context of Christianity into a religion of movement, memory, and materiality. Although the most solitary of vocations, anchorites have been read as central to the formation of various social, spiritual, and literary networks. Lisa Weston, for example, suggests that “community, established through shared liturgy and literacy, 14  Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 27. 15  Cited in Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust, 28.

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is most explicitly displayed in specific networks of amicitia, spiritual friendship, and patronage,” in the Old English Guthlac (ca. 673–714) texts.16 Similarly, in earlier work, I have suggested that anchorites reading and performing the same texts in the same manner at the same time, even though separated by distance, creates a synthetic sisterhood: The English anchoresses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were consumers of the same product, a product that provided guidance about what to wear, what to buy, what to say, what to imagine, what to pray, and what to eat. […] The anchoresses are offered sisterhood via consumption, including the consumption of Christ through the shared vehicle of mystic language.17

More geographically, a system of cells established under the egis of a single bishopric or see might demonstrate a larger connection of place, patronage, and ritual. For example, the town of Norwich boasted around thirty-five recluses at once during Julian’s time.18 Each of these instances demonstrates how anchorites are situated within the wider world of early Christianity and create a transcorporeal, and, perhaps, transtemporal community. Relics, fragments of saints, tie the living and the dead together in a spiritual community. Anchorites lived as the dead among the living, and through their intercessory prayers and community involvement, united the living and the otherworldly together in a spiritual bond.19 Additionally, relics achieve distinction by being “collected” and honoured. In one of the earliest acts of relic gathering, St. Polycarp’s ashes were gathered by his followers after his martyrdom and cremation ca. 155 CE and declared “more precious than precious stones, and finer than gold.”20 Polycarp’s followers both identified his ashes as valuable and as equivalent to his holy person. Furthermore, this begins the tradition of equating relics with precious gems and gold, which in turn leads to the development of elaborate and beautiful reliquaries, and of course the identification of these containers with the relics themselves. Part of the significance of relics comes from collective veneration, such as through relic processions. Still further importance comes from the trade and reputation built up by the ownership and display of fine relics. Relic processions were both celebratory ritual and community reinforcement. Some were repeat16  Lisa M. C. Weston, “Guthlac Betwixt and Between: Literacy, Cross-Temporal Affiliation, and an Anglo-Saxon Anchorite,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 42, no. 1 (2016): 1–27 at 11. 17  Michelle M. Sauer, “‘Prei for me mi leue suster’: The Paradox of the Anchoritic ‘Community’ in Late Medieval England,” Prose Studies 26, no. 1–2 (2003): 153–175 at 162.

18  Many sources about Julian discuss this number. See, for example, Norman Tanner, “Religious Practice,” in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 137–56.

19  See Michelle M. Sauer, “‘In aniversaries of ower leoveste freond seggeth alle nihene’: Patronage, Purgatory, and the Ideals of Anchoritic Friendship,” in Medieval Anchorites in their Communities, ed. Cate Gunn and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017), 101–16.

20  “Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in vol. 2 of The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Kirsopp Lake, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 24–25 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1912 and 1919), http://www. earlychristianwritings.com/ text/martyrdompolycarp-lake.html, 18.



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able, such as the ones that often accompanied the Feast of the Holy Blood. Matthew Paris (1200–1259) recorded such an event, King Henry III’s (1207–1272) procession from St. Paul’s cathedral in London to Westminster Abbey with a relic of the Holy Blood sent to him by Robert of Nantes (1240–1254), patriarch of Jerusalem, in 1247. Julian M. Luxford examines this procession in its specifically Carthusian context, complete with an image found on folio 215r in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 16.21 In the picture, the main figure, Henry III, is shown walking beneath a pall borne on poles by four attendants. He is draped in the humeral veil worn by priests in processions of the Sacrament, wears an open crown, and holds aloft in both hands an egg-shaped reliquary. […] His eyes are fixed on the reliquary, the contents of which are identified by an accompanying inscription as “sanguis Christi.”22

This demonstrates a trend begun during the twelfth century in England of the burgeoning practice of translating relics to large feretory shrines. Such processions were huge events that brought attention to both the city and the cathedral (or church) in question. Aside from translation or other religious celebratory ritual, relics were also sometimes featured as a part of a requiem mass. Megan McLaughlin describes a funeral procession in much the same terms as Matthew Paris does the relic procession: the body was placed on a bier, carried in solemn procession both preceded and accompanied by priests and family, and sometimes relics would be carried out to meet the dead person and welcome them into the next life.23 This was seen as the moment for the community to come together to pay the dead person homage, much as a relic translation provided the community an opportunity to unite in seeking the saint’s favour. The greater the importance of the relic, the more important the dead individual was. Similarly, the greater the relic ensconced in a feretory shrine, the more important the location, both church and town, became. Pilgrims might also come to see the relics, bringing trade and income. Both of these public, communal processes were mirrored within the anchoritic vocation. Although not a yearly event, when the anchorite took vows, they were part of a community-wide “burying ceremony,” which included a requiem mass, before enclosure. Thus, their living body ceased to exist, and their “relic,” their “dead” self, was translated into the cell, where it was enclosed. The cell, much like a reliquary, then represented the once-living anchorite. After enclosure, the anchorhold itself often became a local pilgrimage destination, sparking interest much as relics would.

21  Julian M. Luxford, “A Fifteenth-Century Version of Matthew Paris’s Procession with the Relic of the Holy Blood and Evidence for its Carthusian Context,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 72 (2009), 81–101. 22  Luxford, “Matthew Paris’s Procession,” 82.

23  Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 40.

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Anchorites and Anchorholds as Reliquaries Elsewhere I have discussed, rather extensively, the relation of space and spatial constructs to anchoritism and the anchoritic cells.24 In brief, however, in the anchoritic world, physical space and spiritual space struggle to remain separate, yet constantly overlap. Henri Lefebvre elaborates on the idea of space as a code: “a spatial code is not simply a means of reading or interpreting space; rather it is a means of living in that space: of understanding it and of producing it.”25 In anchoritic reality, space, place, and occupant become almost interchangeable. In looking at anchorites as living relics, then, enframement seems an appropriate extension from a simple architectural term fundamentally meaning “elements that surround a door or window”—both significant parts of a medieval anchorhold—and as a more extensive architectural theory examining implied space and varying degrees of enclosure. Similarly, “coterminous” is often used to clarify the distinction between “confined space” and “delimited space”—that is, not simply the difference between interior and exterior spaces, but also the important linkage between interior and exterior spaces where empty space is defined (delimited) by architecture. Thus, these terms denote strategies of enclosure and enframement, and also raise a series of questions intrinsic to medieval Christian reliquaries, to medieval anchorholds, and, even to other objects of devotion. “Relic space” is metaphorical in nature, too. Relics are often parts of holy bodies harvested after death. Anchorites were holy bodies living on after metaphorical death. And just as the dead saint bridges a gap between penitent mortal and the divine presence, so, too, does the anchorite, who dwells as a dead person among the living, serve as a conduit for the community’s prayers, seeking union with the divine. Ancrene Wisse instructs the anchoress to dig her own grave (literally and symbolically) each day in the floor of her cell: “ha schulden schrapien euche dei þe eorðe up of hare put þet ha schulen rotien in” (They should scrape up the earth every day from the grave in which she will rot).26 This living entombment is a reminder of her own mortality, but also of her special liminal position. Of course, the anchorite was also (often, anyway) enclosed in a cell attached to a church, in sight of the altar, and thus automatically in the presence of relics as well as the tabernacle—by 787 CE, the Second Council of Nicaea decreed that all new churches were required to be built with relics of saints placed inside their altars. This law continued for over one thousand years, until April 6, 1969.27 24  Michelle M. Sauer, “Architecture of Desire: Mediating the Female Gaze in the Medieval English Anchorhold,” Gender & History 25, no. 3 (2013): 541–60. 25  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 47. 26  Ancrene Wisse, 2.1034–35 at 46; Guide, 46.

27  The institution of the second edition of the Roman Missal following the Second Vatican Council. While no longer required, the custom of placing relics of saints in new altars of churches is still considered desirable.



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Aside from relics enshrined in altars, however, every other relic required a suitable container. Reliquary-making, by necessity, involves the use of material. Sumptuous or meaningful materials were an essential part of asserting the importance of reliquaries and their contents in the Middle Ages. Most reliquaries, if possible, were made of gold and gems, asserting tangible value alongside spiritual worth. Some ingeniously re-created the effect of such precious matter through artisanship and meticulous technique. Other substances, however, could also be used; the materials mentioned in the Bible as used in the building of the Temple of Jerusalem—bronze, iron, wood, marble, and again, gold and gems—were favoured choices. Like relics and reliquaries, anchorites, especially anchoresses, were often referred to as jewels or associated with jewel imagery. Ælred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum (Rule for a Recluse; ca. 1160–1162 CE; Ælred 1110/12–1167)28, for instance, suggests that the anchoress’s virginity is gold tested inside the crucible (the cell): Now maydenhood is gold, þy celle is a furnays, þe blowere to melt þys gold is the deuel, fuyr is temptacioun; a maydenes flesche is as hit where a vessel off irþe, wherein gold is iput to ben asayd; wherfore, ȝif þis vessel to-berste þorou gret fuyr of temptacioun, þe gold is ischad out, and scal neuere þis vessel of no crafty man be maad aȝeyn as hit was.29

Now virginity is gold, your cell is a furnace,30 the bellows-blower to melt this gold is the devil, [and] the fire is temptation. The virgin’s flesh is the earthenware vessel in which the gold is put in order to be assayed. Thus, if this vessel is burst asunder by means of the great fire of temptation, the gold is scattered about, and this vessel shall never be put back together again by any artisan.31

A later passage alludes to the idea of jewelry being set: “Sykest þu now, suster, how muche al þyn herte and þy soule schulde be set only in his loue”32 (Seek you now, sister, how much all your heart and your soul should be fixed only on his [Christ’s] love).33 In each of these sections, the anchoress is forged in the furnace of Christ, becoming a jewel set therein, reminiscent of a relic in a reliquary. The cell (and the furnace) is a dynamic space that transforms with the anchorite. The virginity itself, however, is carried carefully in a breakable vessel made of clay. 28  While the original Latin version of Ælred’s text dates to the twelfth century, the two Middle English versions, found in the Vernon Manuscript and MS Bodley 423, date from the late fourteenth century and the mid-fifteenth century respectively.

29  Ælred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum: Two English Versions, ed. John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS o.s. 287 (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), ll. 42–47 at 27.

30  According to the Middle English Dictionary (MED), “furnays” means “a furnace used for purifying metals or glass” but also “as applied to various enclosed chambers and vessels heated from beneath.” I think it is important to note here the direct reference to enclosure. See definitions 2 and 3 for “furnais(e” in MED, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/. 31  My translation.

32  Ælred, De institutione inclusarum, ll. 1342–43 at 58. 33  My translation.

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A similar pattern combining gemstones and fire occurs in Richard Rolle’s Incendium amoris (The Fire of Love, after 1340; Rolle ca. 1300–49), written explicitly to celebrate the solitary way of life: Treuly þai ar liken stone þat is called topazius, þe whilk seldum is fun, & þerfore more precius & full dere it is had; in whilk too colors ar; one is moste pure als gold, & þe toþer clere als heven when it is bright & all clernes of all stonys, it is made [dym]; & treuly if it be þe self be left, his clernes is with-haldyn. […] To gold þai ar lyke for passynge hete of charite, and to heuyn for clernes of heuenly conuersacion; þe whilk passys all saynts lyuys, & þerfore [ar] clerar and bryghtar emonge precius stonys, þat is to say chosyn, for þis lyfe only louand & hauand clerar þa er þen all odyr men þat ar or ellis has bene.34

Truly they [holy contemplatives] are like the stone that is called topaz, the like that is seldom found, and therefore held most precious and dearly, in which two colours are [found]: one is most pure as gold and the other is clear as heaven when it is bright. And it overcomes all the clearness of all stones, and nothing is fairer to behold. So holy contemplatives of whom we spoke before are the rarest. They are like gold for surpassing heat of charity, and to heaven for clearness of heavenly conversation; the which surpass the lives of all saints, and are therefore clearer and brighter among precious stones, that is to say chosen ones, because loving and having this lonely life they are clearer than all other humans that are, or else have been.35

Here the anchorite is first of all set in gold, the ornate and precious setting of most reliquaries. Gold is valuable and rich and perfecting, displaying the object and its value. Quite intriguingly, the anchorite is specifically connected with a topaz, “þe most greete of precios stones.”36 Topaz “keeps a man from sinne / & chast from all euell company.”37 According to several other lapidaries, chastity is one of the main products of topaz: “He þat bereþ þis ston schall loue to lede his bodily chastly.”38 Like Ælred’s gold tested in fire, and Ancrene Wisse’s agate discussed below, the gemstone here improves and reflects the value of the anchorite’s purity. This is similar in nature to the function of a reliquary, which, Hahn states, “honoured the relic and protected it from profane touch. They could even add value […] because precious containers defined the encapsulated object deserving of conspicuous honor and 34  The Fire of Love, and The Mending of Life or The Rule of Living, the First Englisht in 1435, from the De Incendio amoris, the Second in 1434, from the De emendatione vitæ, of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, by Richard Misyn, Bachelor of Theology, Prior of Lincoln, Carmelite […] from MS CCXXXVI in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, ed. Ralph Harvey, EETS o.s. 106 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896), 34. 35  My translation.

36  The Peterborough Lapidary, in English Medieval Lapidaries, ed. Joan Evans and Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 190 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 63–118 at 106–7. 37  The Sloane Lapidary, in English Medieval Lapidaries, ed. Joan Evans and Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 190 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 119–30 at 122.

38  Peterborough Lapidary, 106. Also: “He that bereth þis ston shal þe more loue to leede his body in chastite, & þe more loue to loke to the heuenly Ryal weye,” London Lapidary, in English Medieval Lapidaries, ed. Joan Evans and Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 190 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 16–37 at 19.



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veneration.”39 Moreover, in each of these cases, the anchoress becomes a faceted and set jewel to be carefully displayed, echoing Sara Ritchey’s ideas about Christian materiality, which is always focused on re-creation of divine essence as remade in earthly terms, providing both a portable sacred space and a constant reminder of holy matter.40 This idea of a holy maiden becoming a jewel is reminiscent of the fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision, Pearl, as well. In this poem, the narrator’s dead daughter is transformed into the wondrous Pearl maiden, a Bride of Christ. Discussing this transformation, Felicity Riddy notes that medieval English uses the word “jewel” to describe any highly ornamented and precious object and goes on to argue that both the dreamer’s daughter and the poem itself are jewels in this sense of the word.41 Similarly, texts about recluses make it clear that the anchorite is a precious object, a jewel, and a relic. Several texts focused on reclusion suggest that the anchorite is not only herself a relic kept in the reliquary of the anchorhold, but also her own body serves as a reliquary for holding relics of Christ. For instance, Ancrene Wisse states that the anchoress should think of Christ as an agate kept in the nest of her heart: Þe earn de in his nest a deorewurðe ȝimstan, achate hatte, for nan attri þing ne mei þe stan nahhin, ne hwil he is i þe nest hearmin his briddes. Þis deorewurðe stan, þet is Iesu Crist, ase stan treowe ant ful of alle mihtes, ouer alle ȝimstanes; he is þe achate þet atter of sunne ne nahhede neuver. Do him i þi nest—þet is, i þin heorte.42 The eagle puts in his nest a precious stone called agate, because no poisonous thing can come near the stone, or harms its chicks while it is in the nest. This precious stone is Jesus Christ, true as stone and full of all powers, above all precious stones; he is the agate that the poison of sin never came near. Put him in your nest, that is, in your heart.43

The treatise further suggests that if she cannot keep the jewel itself, then she should at least keep its image, that is the crucifix, in her cell: “Hwa-se ne mei þes ȝimstan habben ne halden i þe nest of hire heorte, lanhure i þe nest of hire ancre-hus habbe his i-liche—þet is, þe crucifix44 (Anyone who cannot keep this precious stone in the nest of her heart should at least have its image—that is, the crucifix—in the nest of her anchor-house45). Here, Christ is a healing gem much like a relic; however,

39  Cynthia Hahn, “Metaphor and Meaning in Early Medieval Reliquaries,” in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, and Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 239–63 at 239.

40  Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), especially 1–23.

41  Felicity Riddy, “The Materials of Culture: Jewels in Pearl,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997), 143–55 at 147–48. 42  Ancrene Wisse, 3.234–39 at 54. 43  Guide, 54.

44  Ancrene Wisse, 3.248–49 at 54. 45  Guide, 54.

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since he is kept within the anchoress herself, she becomes both relic and reliquary. Agates were especially known for curing stings: “if eny scorpion or eny serpent stynge eny best, mak þis ston to powder & let it opone þe wounde or drinke it with wiȝe wyne, & þey sall be hol”46 (if any scorpion or any serpent stings any creature, make this stone into a powder and pour it upon the wound or drink it [mixed] with white wine, and they shall be whole47). Aside from actual poison, this toxicant clearly refers to lust and envy, as earlier in the treatise Ancrene Wisse refers to the scorpion of lechery and the serpent of envy—both sins to which it was believed women were especially vulnerable.48 Agate is therefore a valuable tool in the battle for continence. It was also a desirable substance for the making of reliquaries, both personal ones, such as pendants, as well as splendid ones celebrating famous saints, such as St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231).49 The stone was meant to amplify the healing and protective nature of the relics within, and, when accompanied by gold, its worth and purity were increased. Moreover, according to lapidary tradition, agate was also used to find pearls. Divers tied an agate to a rope and dropped it into the sea. The pearl would then be attracted to the agate, and the diver could follow the rope to the pearl. The symbolism of pearls should be clear here—they are round, perfect, white, and pure.50 In fact, they can also be linked to the anchoritic tradition through the Katherine texts. In a version of St. Margaret of Antioch’s legend, James of Voragine (ca. 1228–1298), the Dominican archbishop of Genoa and hagiographer, compared Margaret to a pearl (“margarita” means “pearl” in Latin): “In the vita, James explains that ‘she is named Margaret after a certain precious jewel, which is called a pearl: which is a bright, small and virtuous jewel. Thus blessed Margaret was shining through virginity, small through humility, virtuous through the work of miracles.’”51 Later sermons include references to Christ as a merchant who seeks good pearls (“bonas margaritas”), thereby suggesting that pearls and potential saints are especially intertwined. While not specifically labelled a pearl, in The Sparkling Stone (De calculo, ca. 1340) by the Augustinian canon and Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec (1293/94–1381) the titular stone is also Jesus, who is received within the heart of the contemplative: 46  Peterborough Lapidary, 67. 47  My translation.

48  See Lucinda Rumsey and Lucinder Rumsey, “The Scorpion of Lechery and Ancrene Wisse,” Medium Ævum 61, no. 1 (1992): 48–58. 49  See a description of this relic, along with multiple images, at the website of the Swedish National Museum: https://historiska.se/upptack-historien/object/41345-relikvarium-elisabethrelikvarietav-silver-guld-adelsten-parla/. 50  At least to some extent, all pearls evoke the image of the Pearl of Great Price in Matthew 13:45–46.

51  James of Voragine, Legenda aurea. Cited and translated by Jenny C. Bledsoe, “Practical Hagiography: James of Voragine’s Sermones and Vita on St Margaret of Antioch,” Medieval Sermon Studies 57 (2013): 29–48 at 41.



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There may no man entere the sayde exercyse be cunnynge ffor contemplatyfe lyfe may nouȝt be tauȝt oone be anoþere bot where as god whiche es verrey trowthe manyfestys hym selfe in spirit. Þer […] he schalle gyffe hym alytil white stone and in it a newe name the whiche no man knowes but who that takys it. This litel stone promysed to a victorious man it is called Calcalus.52 for the litelnes þer of. ffor ȝyf alle a man trede it with his fete ȝit he is not hurte þer with. This stone it is rede with a schyny-nge witnesse to the lykenesse of a flawme of fyre. litylle and rownde and be the serkle þer of it is playne and smothe. Be þis litel stone we vndyrstande oure lorde ihesu cryste.53

There may no man enter into the aforesaid exercises to master the contemplative life be taught by another except where God, who is Truth, manifests himself in spirit. There he [God] […] shall give him [the contemplative] a little white stone and in it a new name which no one knows except those who take it. This little stone, promised to the victorious man, is called Pebble because of how small it is—it does not cause hurt if someone treads upon it with their feet. This stone is red with a shining whiteness, resembling a flame of fire; [it is] little and round and the circumference thereof is even and smooth. By this little stone we understand it to mean our lord, Jesus Christ.54

Although not directly an anchoritic text, Van Ruusbroec had close ties to the Beguines and was an important voice in establishing the individual contemplative life. One of his works, Die Geestelike Brulocht (The Spiritual Espousals, ca. 1340) was partially translated into Middle English and used as part of the basis for The Chastising of God’s Children (ca. 1390), a work meant for female religious with significant anchoritic connections. This work, The Sparkling Stone, was also translated into Middle English and survives in the Amherst Manuscript (London, British Library, MS Additional 37790), a Carthusian anthology, where it is collected with a number of anchoritic or anchoritic-adjacent works, including several of Rolle’s texts, Marguerite Porete’s Le Mirouer des simples âmes (Mirror of Simple Souls, early fourteenth century; Porete d. 1310), Julian of Norwich’s Shewings to an Anchoress (ca. 1373; Julian 1343–after 1416), and Birgitta’s Revelationes coelestes (Celestial Revelations, fourteenth century; Birgitta ca. 1303–1373).55 In this passage, the stone is described as even, round, and smooth. It is clearly precious and peerless, and similarly forged in, or at least tempered by, fire like the furnaces of gold mentioned above. And although it is Jesus rather than the anchorite who is the pearl in this instance, once the recluse has received the stone, they become the reliquary and therefore the representation of the relic (Jesus) within. 52  This is a misspelling in the manuscript. The Latin term meant here is “calculus,” meaning “pebble.” 53  My transcription from the Amherst Manuscript: London, British Library, MS Additional 37790, fol. 117v. Digitized manuscript available here: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer. aspx?ref=add_ms_37790_fs001r. 54  My translation.

55  For access to the complete contents of this manuscript, see note 53 above.

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Along with pearls, jewels, and gold, ivory was also prized for making reliquaries because it reflects the tactility and whiteness of skin, implying a sense of the flesh; almost every medieval treasury seems to have had at least one ivory box. However, by the later fourteenth century, alabaster, a previously undervalued material, became popular for elite effigies, royal commissions, and fashionable reliquaries. Rachel Dressler suggests that alabaster served a number of needs: “it was convenient to obtain, easy to work, and similar to marble in its ability to represent pure unblemished flesh.”56 Moreover, it was considered a distinctly English product, inspiring a sense of national identity as well as devotional intensity. Although less common in anchoritic imagery than gold and jewels, alabaster figures prominently in one aspect of the reclusive life. In the story of Mary of Bethany and Martha, Mary breaks an alabaster jar of oil over Jesus’s head, signifying yet again the superior office of the contemplative over the active life. In Ælred’s Rule, he admonishes: Therefore breke the harde alebastir boxe of thyn hert and that that is with-in of deuocyon, of loue, of desire or of affeccyon, helde it on Iesu thy spouses heed, wurshipynge God in man and man in Gode.57 Therefore break the hard alabaster box of your heart whatever devotion, love, desire, or affection you have within you, hold it against Jesus’s, your spouse’s, head, worshipping the God in the man and the man in God.58

The anchoress has chosen the better path, and despite the grumbling she may hear, she is to hold her course, breaking alabaster as she needs. A. S. Lazikani asserts that the anchoress’s heart becomes a “material substance: she owns an alabaster heart.”59 In this way, I suggest that she is transforming into relic and reliquary. Later in the text, Ælred says that Christ pours himself into the anchoress’ insides, much as she poured her heart’s oil onto him. Not only are heart, box, and alabaster all the stuff of relics, but holy oil is, too. A great number of saints, especially incorruptible ones, exuded sweet oil from their bodies or bones, and relics were made by dipping pieces of cloth into this, echoing Paulinus’ long-ago practice of mixing oil and holy dust at the tomb of St. Felix.60 These precious reminders of a saint were treasured and kept safe. Similarly, the chastity, and perhaps the virginity, of the anchoress was also something that needed to be guarded much as a precious reliquary was. Idung of Prüfening, a twelfth-century Cluniac monk, draws a connection between women and precious vessels: a consecrated woman was a “fragile vessel” because of her womanly foibles and a “golden vessel” because of the precious gift of virginity. He argued that only 56  Rachel Dressler, “Identity, Status, and Material: Medieval Alabaster Effigies in England,” Peregrinations 5, no. 2 (2015): 65–96 at 96. 57  Ælred, De institutione inclusarum, ll. 788–89 at 20. 58  My translation.

59  A. S. Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), 17. 60  These saints are known as myroblytes.



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women could lose their virginity by force—the breaking of the metaphorical glass.61 Ancrene Wisse echoes this idea of chastity as a vessel to be guarded: a deore licur, a deorewurðe wet as basme is, in a feble uetles, healewi i bruchel gles, nalde ha gan ut of þrung bute ha fol were? Habemus thesaurum istum in uasis fictilibus, dicit Apostolus Þis bruchele uetles, þet is wummone flesch, þah noðleatere þe basme, þe healewi is meidenhad þet is þrin, oðer, eft[er] meiðlure, chaste cleannesse. Þis bruchele uetles bruchel [is] as is eani gles, for beo hit eanes tobroken, ibet ne bið hit neauer, ne hal as hit wes ear.62 if someone were carrying a valuable liquid, a precious fluid such as balsam, in a frail vessel, an ointment in fragile glass, surely she would head out of a crowd unless she was stupid? We have this treasure in earthen vessels, the Apostle says. This frail vessel is woman’s flesh, although nevertheless it contains the balsam, the ointment that is virginity, or, after loss of virginity, chaste purity. This frail vessel is as fragile as any glass, because if it is once broken, it will never be mended or as whole as it was before.63

Solitude, enclosure, and prayer preserve both the container—the fragile glass— and the precious balsam inside. However, even Ancrene Wisse acknowledges that the glass must also be carefully displayed in order to inspire similar preservation in others. When surrounded by the body of Christ and shown in special circumstances, the “precious vessel” can even inspire “virginity of the heart and soul” in other women. Crystal ampoules were sometimes used as reliquaries, especially for those holding liquid relics, such as holy blood or holy oil. These are material examples of the precious liquid in a fragile glass. As Genevra Kornbluth has demonstrated through examinations of Carolingian engraved gemstones that feature crystal, the purity of crystal signifies the divine origins of baptism, the Incarnation, and the Passion.64 Anchoresses, dwelling in their houses of stone near baptismal fonts, with constant sight of the tabernacle and crucifix as well as many reminders of the carnality of Christ, become the pure crystal vessels.65 Since rock crystal was a symbol of spiritual purity, the mineral was frequently used to adorn saints’ reliquaries from the early Middle Ages onward.

61  “The more fragile the vessel, the more diligent the care it needs lest the vessel be broken […] [or] carried off through theft or pillage, a protection which golden vessels require more than glass. A consecrated woman requires both kinds of protection for she can, metaphorically, be called a glass vessel because of her fragile sex and a golden vessel because of the ideal of the office of virgin.” Idung of Prüfening, Argumentum 6, cited in Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 28. 62  Ancrene Wisse, 3.511–12 and 513–16 at 63. 63  Guide, 63.

64  Genevra Kornbluth, Engraved Gems of the Carolingian Empire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 17.

65  For more on crystals and texts concerning reclusion, see Michelle M. Sauer, “Lithic Agency and Generative Functions of Crystals in The Revelations of St Birgitta: Books 1 and 3,” in Devotion, Materiality, and Reclusion in Medieval Europe (1080–1400), ed. Michelle M. Sauer and Joshua S. Easterling (Woodbridge: Boydell, forthcoming).

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Crystals often served as decorative covers, or magnified engravings, especially in early reliquaries, or were worked into the design as a “peeping” window—a similar feature of anchorholds, with their gift windows, hagioscopes, and squints. In the high Middle Ages, however, rock crystal was often not only decorative but also used as a chamber. In this way, the relic would be revealed for veneration rather than hidden from view as in earlier reliquaries. Moreover, the crystal chamber magnified the relics contained inside, establishing the real presence of the saint. And many were placed very particularly so as to catch the sunlight and refract the light, bringing depth, prism, and even sparkle to the sacred objects.66 The emergence of this new type of transparent reliquary can be linked with a renewed interest in visibility and interiority in medieval religion, as a way to render the invisible visible, just as the anchorhold served to remind the community of the anchoress’s presence as a living relic, while also serving to protect her, to shield her from view, and to safeguard her own sight as well. Anchorholds, like reliquaries, both conceal and reveal, and many are dependent upon the plays of light inside. Actual light was likely provided or enhanced by “light windows,” especially in two story cells, while other aspects of light and shadow may have played a part in prayers, such as the light from a cross sewn into a window covering. Aside from crystal vials, the reference here to the anchoritic body possessing a precious ampoule is also reminiscent of the more traditional clay relic jugs. The Latin phrase inserted between the Middle English in the above passage, originally from 2 Corinthians 4:7, specifically refers to clay jars. And, of course, the similar passage in Ælred’s Rule for a Recluse cites “earthenware vessels.” Cynthia Hahn has thoroughly explored ampullae, both crystal and clay, in the course of her work on contact relics. Small souvenirs from pilgrimages held oils accepted as contact relics because they were gathered at shrines where they had been placed in direct physical contact with a relic or reliquary before being sealed and taken home.67 Similarly, Maggie Duncan-Flowers notes ampullae filled with “holy manna,” that is, dust expelled from saintly tombs, were also collected and carried home.68 Such jars assisted with recreating the pilgrimage experience as well as expanding holy space or even creating personal holy space. Another way of recreating a holy place for oneself was transporting the very dirt upon which Jesus, Mary, and the Apostles trod. Hordes of pilgrims and crusaders returned to Europe with dirt from the Holy Land. As Caroline Walker Bynum notes, “the high and later Middle Ages saw unparalleled enthusiasm for transporting the Holy Land to Europe. Pilgrims took earth from the Holy Sepulcher to put under the 66  See Genevra Kornbluth, “Active Optics: Carolingian Rock Crystal on Medieval Reliquaries,” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 4 (2014), https://differentvisions. org/issue-four/2019/07/active-optics-carolingian-rock-crystal-on-medieval-reliquaries/.

67  Cynthia Hahn, “Loca Sancta Souvenirs: Sealing the Pilgrim’s Experience,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. Robert Ousterhout (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 85–96 at 87.

68  Maggie Duncan-Flowers, “An Ampulla from the Shrine of St. John in Blessings” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. Robert Ousterhout (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 125–39 at 135.



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floor of their chapels.”69 Therefore, the hierotopy associated with the relics grew while not diminishing the original in any way. In fact, if anything, the power of the original expanded with its distribution and material transmission. Of course, the efficacy of this influence was diminished if the relic was lost or destroyed, such as the cracking of the ampoule. The shape of reliquaries is another issue altogether. Since reliquaries are visual, they project a need for physical contact with the pilgrim beyond optics, no matter how active medieval optics may be. Many relics carried an expectation of touch. Contact with them brought more powerful healing or a swifter answer to one’s prayers. Some reliquaries, especially the very small and the privately owned, were intended to facilitate contact with individual worshippers. Cross-shaped pendants were popular forms of personal relics, shaped and formed to facilitate an interaction between relic and owner, just as a cruciform squint facilitates the interaction between anchoress and Jesus. In some cases, reliquaries served as protection against overzealous worshippers who could have damaged the relic.70 Similarly, squints and hagioscopes, as well as curtains, protect the anchorite from overzealous pilgrims who insist on catching a glimpse of the holy personage. While the body-part relics are memorable, many reliquaries, especially in the early Middle Ages, used iconographic shapes, such as cruciform or starburst—or the casket, sometimes called a purse (see Figure 4.1). For centuries, the casketshaped reliquary was most common, evoking not the sense of living physical presence that the body part ones did, but instead reminding the viewer that the saint is now sharing the afterlife with Christ, and as such is closer to the divine than regular human beings. The saint has left all earthly tribulations behind, and is in eternal bliss—yet will, from this seat of pleasure, still assist his or her devotees. Moreover, the primary connotation of death as the static state is unsatisfactory: although physically dead, the saint is “alive” in his/her relics,71 not to mention alive in the minds, hearts, and prayers of the faithful. Similarly, the anchorite is buried alive in a cell that was often shaped like a tomb, or at least like a reliquary casket (see Figure 4.2). And, like the saintly counterpart, the anchorite is dead to the world, seeking union with the divine, and a strong intercessor on behalf of his or her patrons and community members. That numerous cells are built beyond the rood screen, allowing unfettered access to the Eucharist and the constant divine presence, cements the image of anchorite as living saint—and as living relic. Reliquaries, like anchorholds, called upon the viewer to complete the imaginative “whole,” to respond and interact with the relic. They bedazzled with their beauty and reflective surfaces; they taught viewers how to respond to the relic, to venerate and honour it. They evoked the power of the body, to lift the mind heavenward, and to make prayer. Along these same lines, even the authors of anchoritic 69  Bynum, Christian Materiality, 137.

70  Sophie Sawicka-Sykes discusses concerns raised about the potential mishandling of relics in her article in this volume. 71  Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 3 and passim.

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Figure 4.2. Casketshaped anchorhold at St. Michael and All Angels in Hartlip, Kent. Photograph © Michelle M. Sauer.

Figure 4.1. Thomas à Becket casket reliquary (ca. 1190–1200), Musée de Cluny, CL.23296, oblique view. Photograph © Genevra Kornbluth.



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Rules insisted on creating tableaus of happenings within the anchorhold, both good and bad, with the words of the prayers bedazzling with complex imagery and allegorical motifs, teaching readers how to respond to God, to love and serve him. Cynthia Hahn’s examination of the purse reliquary has revealed that contrary to the iconography pointing solely to death or even wisdom—the more traditional readings of such shapes—the purse shape is rather tied directly to the Apostles, and to their successors, the bishops. More specifically, it is related to the bishop’s role in disseminating wisdom and enhancing spiritual life and liturgical performance. Anchorites, as we know, were investigated by the bishop’s office, reported directly to bishops, and were part of a bishop’s arsenal in establishing his see as a seat of holiness.72 The traditional casket shape, while surely practical, also recalled the holy continuum of Christianity, stretching back centuries.

Conclusion

Malo argues that as saints’ bodies became more and more elaborately enshrined, the language of saints’ lives and miracle collections—with their characteristic rhetoric of treasure and brightness—provided a substitute for direct experience of the relic. She states, “the adornment of reliquaries is entirely incommensurate with what is inside. Translation and enshrinement thus efface what the relic has in common with the supplicant: the body, the inevitability of decay, and the promise of resurrection.”73 The body itself becomes a primary source of the production of meaning in reliquaries. Malo further suggests that relic discourse provides a substitution for physical experience. In this instance, then, the anchoritic experience excels, since the cell’s occupant is confined within and may only journey through spiritual means. In this way, relics and artworks could encourage vicarious mental pilgrimage, with attention to “sensory information […] bearing primary status in determining reality.”74 Other anchoritic works, the various Rules, virgin martyr hagiographies, allegorical treatises, lyrical prayers, and autobiographical works like Julian of Norwich’s Shewings and Margery Kempe’s Book can all be reassessed with an eye towards relic discourse (Margery, ca. 1373–after 1438). In anchoritic reality, since space, place, and occupant become fused and almost interchangeable, we can view the anchorhold, and the anchorite inside it, as living relics, preserved within a very public reliquary. 72  See Hahn, “Metaphor and Meaning in Early Medieval Reliquaries,” 247–49. For anchorites and their direct ties to bishops, see Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), especially ch. 3, “Bishops and Anchorites: Procedure and Protection,” 53–91. 73  Malo, Relics and Writing, 50.

74  Scott B. Montgomery, St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group Sanctity in Late Medieval Europe (Bern: Lang, 2010), 182.

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Michelle M. Sauer is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota. She specializes in Middle English language and literature, focusing on reclusion, monasticism, hagiography, and queer/gender theory. Her publications include numerous articles and the books Celebrating St. Albert and His Rule: Rules, Devotion, Orthodoxy, and Dissent (2018, with Kevin Alban), Gender in Medieval Culture (2015), and The Lesbian Premodern (2011, with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney), among others.

RELICS AND THE RECLUSE’S TOUCH IN GOSCELIN’S MIRACLES OF ST. EDMUND SOPHIE SAWICKA-SYKES*

Often ranking last in the order of the bodily senses, touch was frequently

associated with baseness and carnality; it therefore needed careful guardianship.1 A notable example of the anxiety surrounding this sense comes from the thirteenthcentury guide for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses). In a section of the text concerning touch or feeling (felunge),2 the author juxtaposes the fleshly suffering of the Lord incarnate with the daily sacrifices required of the anchoresses, in order to reinforce the high standards they must meet: “God’s hands were nailed to the cross; by those nails I entreat you, anchoresses […] keep your hands inside your windows!” (Godes honden weren ineilet o rode; þurh þe ilke neiles Ich halsi ow, ancres […] haldeþ ower honden inwið ower þurles!)3 He is disgusted by the thought of even writing about the “fondling or any kind of touching between a man and an anchoress” (honlunge oðer ei felunge bitweone mon ant ancre) as if the very portrayal of such an act could inspire sensual transgression.4 Yet, later in the text, he encourages his female readers to “flee” (flih) in meditation or “creep” (creop) in supplication into the open wound in Christ’s hand, “dug into by the blunt nails” on the cross (idoluen wið þe dulle neiles).5 By imaginatively enclosing herself within the saviour’s wound, the reader of Ancrene Wisse is urged to create an additional barrier between the outside world and her inner purity.6 Ironically, the anchoress could evoke the visceral image of Christ’s wounded flesh to escape the carnal. The *  I wish to thank Tom Licence, Nicholas Hoffman, Kathryn Maude, and the editors of this volume for their insights on this topic and practical support.

1  For an exploration of the relative value of touch compared to the other senses in the early Middle Ages, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Hands and Eyes, Sight and Touch: Appraising the Senses in Anglo-Saxon England,” Anglo-Saxon England 45 (2016): 105–40; for ideas surrounding touch in the later Middle Ages, see C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), especially 23 and 29. 2  Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), hereafter AW. 3  All translations are from Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), hereafter Guide. 4  AW, 2.1023 at vol. 1, p. 46; Guide, 46.

5  AW, 4.1634 at 111; Guide, 111.

6  Catherine Innes-Parker notes that Christ’s body is “reconstructed as an anchorhold” in this section of the text in “Fragmentation and Reconstruction: Images of the Female Body in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group,” Comitatus 26, no. 1 (1995): 27–52 at 38.

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example suggests that touch, per se, was not always associated with moral corruption: if the heart was pure, the hands could also be clean. Ancrene Wisse’s discussion of the five outer senses—how they should be guarded and directed towards a spiritually edifying purpose—has prompted some critical reflection on anchoritic touch. While Alexandra Barratt somewhat reductively viewed the text’s evocation of Christ’s hand wound as an “excuse for a bizarre and macabre conclusion in which anchoresses are warned to keep their hands to themselves,” later work by Catherine Innes-Parker, Elizabeth Robertson, and Nicholas Hoffman has explored the nuanced portrayal of touch as a gateway for both sin and salvation.7 In her examination of the AB texts (comprising Ancrene Wisse and the five texts of the Katherine Group), Robertson argued that the skin was envisaged not just as corruptible matter, but also as a protective boundary, a medium between the world of the senses and the world of thought, a focal point for affective meditation and, when physical touch was prohibited, a stimulus for “mental expansion.”8 Robertson’s paper ends with an analysis of the representation of John 20:17 in medieval and early modern art, a scene which captures the moment when faith (represented by Mary Magdalene) transcends the sensory realm to grasp the truth about Jesus’s transformed nature.9 In this case, the denial of touch is associated with enhanced physical and spiritual stimulation. Given that the readership of the AB texts included anchorites and the enclosed religious, it would be tempting to associate the readers’ relative lack of bodily contact with this ideal of encountering God in a non-physical way.10 While Ancrene Wisse is undoubtedly an important and fruitful source of information about attitudes towards anchoritic touch in the high Middle Ages, this didactic guidebook is more concerned with what the anchoress should not touch, rather than tactile encounters with the very stuff of Christian materiality, including relics.11 That is not to say that text has not inspired insights into medieval material 7  Alexandra Barrett, “The Five Wits and their Structural Significance in Part II of Ancrene Wisse,” Medium Ævum 56, no. 1 (1987): 12–24 at 22; Innes-Parker, “Fragmentation and Reconstruction”; Elizabeth Robertson, “Noli me tangere: The Enigma of Touch in Middle English Religious Literature and Art for and about Women,” in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. Katie L. Walker, New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 29–55; Nicholas Hoffman, “Feeling through the Anchorhold: The Tactility of Enclosure in Ancrene Wisse,” presented at the International Anchoritic Society Conference, Norwich, 2018. 8  Robertson, “Noli me tangere: The Enigma of Touch,” 31. For a complementary analysis of the importance of the sense of sight in artistic representations of the Noli me tangere motif, see Barbara Baert, “‘Do not hold onto me’ or The Gaze in the Garden: Body and Embodiment in Noli me tangere (John 20:17),” in Interspaces Between Word, Gaze and Touch: The Bible and the Visual Medium in the Middle Ages, Annua nuntia Lovaniensia 62 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 11–34 at 16. 9  Robertson, “Noli me tangere: The Enigma of Touch,” 39–49.

10  A. S. Lazikani interprets one of the Katherine group texts within the context of its anchoritic readership in “Liminal Performance in Hali Meiðhad,” in “Anchoritic Studies and Liminality,” special issue Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 41, no. 1 (2016): 28–43.

11  The seminal text on this topic is of course Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011). On the importance of touch, see, for example, 127.

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culture. On the contrary, Robertson has highlighted that the author of the Ancrene Wisse “continually directs the reader’s attention to the physical world around her” in order to “guid[e] her thoughts to the potential transcendent power found in the world itself,” and Arthur J. Russell has considered how the anchoress’s physical interactions with the architecture of the cell reinforces the guide’s ascetic teachings.12 Furthermore, despite there only being one direct mention of relics in Ancrene Wisse, Michelle M. Sauer’s essay in this volume productively discusses how we can read the text in light of “relic discourse.”13 Even so, in order to gain a broader understanding of the intersection between haptic spirituality and reclusion, it is necessary to expand our investigation beyond Ancrene Wisse and explore earlier texts of different genres. Not only will this work unearth more material for analysis, but also it will provide a helpful context for discussion of materiality and the senses in more frequently studied texts on anchoritic devotion. This article goes some way towards filling the gap in the scholarship by examining the relationship between anchoritism, devotion, and touch in an Anglo-Latin collection of the miracles of St. Edmund (841–869) attributed to Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (hereafter GME, ca. 1100; Goscelin, ca. 1035–ca. 1107).14 I focus on book 2, chapter 5, a section of the text which features Seitha, a young female recluse who lived in close proximity to the community of monks at Bury St. Edmunds in the 1090s.15 Seitha acted as Goscelin’s source for four miracles that purportedly took place in the last decade of the eleventh century, some of which are recounted in her own words. What is particularly fascinating about this chapter of the miracle collection is that it functions as an extended dis12  Elizabeth Robertson, “‘This Living Hand’: Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist Immanence, and the Reader of the Ancrene Wisse,” Speculum 78, no. 1 (2003): 1–36 at 32; Arthur J. Russell, “The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2016), 68–73.

13  Michelle M. Sauer, “Framing Materiality: Relic Discourse and Medieval English Anchoritism,” Early Middle English, 3, no. 1 (2021): 51–70. The reference to relics in Ancrene Wisse appears in AW, 1.60–63 at 8; Guide, 8. 14  Tom Licence made the case for Goscelin’s authorship in the introduction to Miracles of St. Edmund: Herman the Archdeacon and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014), cxiv–cxxvii. All future references to the miracle collections by Herman (HME) and Goscelin (GME) will be to this edition.

15  Goscelin states that Seitha was invited to live in a “little cottage” at Bury St. Edmund’s by Abbot Baldwin (GME, 2.5, 276–77). The vowess herself later specifies that she met the sacrist, Toli, in 1095 when she had “applied for citizenship” of the abbey (GME, 2.5, 278–79). She was still present there when Goscelin composed De miraculis S. Eadmundi (The Miracles of St. Edmund) around the year 1100. In Hermits and Recluses in English Society: 950–1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 83, Licence proposes that the “Seitha” to whom Anselm refers in his letter of 1102, and the vowess of Goscelin’s text, are one and the same person. For more information on Seitha, see Elisabeth van Houts, “The Women of Bury St Edmunds,” in Bury St. Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Tom Licence (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 53–73 at 64–69. See also Tom Licence, “History and Hagiography in the Late Eleventh Century: The Life and Work of Herman the Archdeacon, Monk of Bury St Edmunds,” English Historical Review 24, no. 508 (2009): 516–44 at 527–30; The Miracles of Saint Edmund, liii; and “The Cult of St. Edmund,” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Licence, 104–30.

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course on the ethics of touch, presenting the anchoress as one of the spiritually pure elite who can handle relics without reproof. Since Goscelin focuses on Seitha’s sensations when handling holy objects, rather than writing about the prohibition of physical contact in the anchoritic vocation, the text offers new insights into the values ascribed to the anchoress’s sense of touch.

Handling and Mishandling the Cult of St. Edmund

The cult of St. Edmund lends itself particularly well to a discussion of tactile spirituality.16 The earliest hagiography of the martyred king of the East Angles, Abbo of Fleury’s late-tenth-century Passio S. Eadmundi (The Passion of St. Edmund; Abbo, ca. 945–1004), relates how the Danish invaders shot Edmund with arrows and beheaded him after he refused to renounce his Christianity and yield his power.17 Miraculously, however, the severed head reattached itself to Edmund’s body, and his relics remained incorrupt.18 While both virginity and martyrdom are essential to Abbo’s construction of Edmund’s sanctity, he claims that the miraculous preservation of the flesh is the “exceptional privilege granted to virginity.”19 The intactness of the body in death is an expression of Edmund’s sexual purity in life. It was therefore vital for the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds to preserve the whole-body relic of the saint while also promoting his power via the objects that he touched. From the 1070s to the late 1090s, Abbot Baldwin (ca. 1065–97) was actively involved in distributing Edmund’s contact relics abroad.20 On April 29, 1095, he presided over the translation of the whole-body relic of St. Edmund from a rotunda in the cemetery of the monks to the newly completed Romanesque presbytery, where it was housed in a shrine above the altar.21 The clothes of St. Edmund, including a

16  For an analysis of the cult of St. Edmund and physical touch in the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, see Michael Widner, “Samson’s Touch and a Thin Red Line: Reading the Bodies of Saints and Jews in Bury St Edmunds,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 111, no. 3 (2012): 339–59. 17  Abbo of Fleury, Passio S. Eadmundi, in Memorials of St. Edmunds Abbey, ed. Thomas Arnold, 3 vols., Rolls Series 96 (London: HMSO, 1890–96), 1:65–87. 18  Abbo, Passio 14, 1:82.

19  Abbo, Passio 17, 1:86–87.

20  Licence, “The Cult of St Edmund,” 107–9.

21  John Crook, “The Architectural Setting of the Cult of St Edmund at Bury, 1095–1539,” in Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology, and Economy, ed. Antonia Gransden, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 20 (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 1998), 34–44 at 38, and Rebecca Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), 125. The tomb of the whole-body relic of St Edmund may have been accessible to pilgrims from below the shrine, as suggested by Crook, “The Architectural Setting of the Cult,” 40, and Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund, 131. Rebecca Browett has argued that the new site of the saint’s body may not have been easily accessible to pilgrims in “Touching the Holy: The Rise of Contact Relics in Medieval England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 68, no. 3 (2017): 493–509 at 506. However, Goscelin suggests that pilgrims could go right up to the shrine in the Miracles of St. Edmund 2.4, 272–73, and 2.6, 302–3.

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shirt stained with blood, were kept in a separate coffer, near the other reliquaries.22 While these items were not normally on public display, Herman (fl. 1090s), an archdeacon of the abbey and author of the first extant miracle collection of St. Edmund, took advantage of the opportunity for promoting the cult by exhibiting the bloodstained garment of the saint for a charge.23 In his collection of the miracles performed by St. Edmund between 980 and the mid-1090s, Herman states that from these clothes, “the benefits of the shrine’s divine power are available to common folk” (de sacrario diuinitatis presto sunt beneficia multis), which is no doubt a reference to his practice of taking St. Edmund’s secondary relics out for all to see.24 His behaviour came under attack in Goscelin’s miracle collection, which was written only a short time after Herman’s text, around the year 1100.25 In general, Goscelin seems to have a rather dim view of pilgrims who handled the relics of St. Edmund without the appropriate degree of reverence. When recounting the translation of the saint into the new presbytery in 1095, for example, he explains how visitors, worried that their journey will be wasted, “try to shove on through the madding throng, trusting more to force than to clamour of prayer” (preconium non tam clamore quam uiribus, irruentes dirimere phalanges conabatur).26 Goscelin then compares the saint’s bier to the Ark of the Covenant, a locus of holy power that was kept at a distance from ordinary Israelites (Joshua 3:4). Divine punishment for touching the sacred vessel of Edmund’s bier is shown to be immediate: one visitor who laid his hand upon it found himself nursing a crushed arm.27 In Goscelin’s account of how Herman mishandled St. Edmund’s precious secondary relics, he describes the crowd that gathered in the abbey pejoratively as an “army” (turm[a]) and, later, “mob” (uulg[us]).28 Herman stoked up this chaos when he took Edmund’s blood-stained clothing out of its casket “before everyone’s eyes, and invited them to kiss it” (prorsus […] cernentibus cunctis […], inuitat ad osculandum).29 His pandering to the people was done with such careless disregard for the secondary relic that “the holy blood which stained it fell to the ground and perished” (sacer sanguis quo infecta fuerat humi decidit et periit).30 The verb “perished” (periit) suggests that Edmund’s bodily fluid was still imbued with life until Herman, re-enacting the 22  Crook, “The Architectural Setting of the Cult,” 38, and Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund, 146.

23  For information on Herman’s career and works, see Licence, “The Cult of St Edmund,” especially 112 and 114, and his “New Light on the Life and Work of Herman the Archdeacon,” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Licence, 94–103. Licence’s earlier findings are recorded in Miracles of St Edmund, xxxv–lix, and “History and Hagiography,” passim.

24  HME, 22: 54–55. In the introduction of his edition to Herman’s miracle collection, Licence argues that the final draft was probably written around 1098 (lviii). 25  Licence, “The Cult of St Edmund,” 119–22.

26  GME, 2.2: 256–57.

27  GME, 2.2: 256–57.

28  GME, 2.5: 288–89 and 294–95. 29  GME, 2.5: 288–89. 30  GME, 2.5: 294–95.

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impiety of the Danes, spilt it and effectively martyred the king for a second time. Following this display, Herman fell ill; he died three days later.31 Goscelin demonstrates that, in contrast to Herman, Seitha the anchoress treats the secondary relics of St. Edmund with due reverence and achieves a spiritual and physical intimacy with the saint surpassing that of the other enclosed religious in the community. Seitha is present at Herman’s egregious display of the bloodied garment and participates in the spectacle. However, she is not reprimanded by Goscelin. Instead, he states that Edmund’s grace and delightful smell flow from the garments “upon such a one [Seitha] who has clean hands and a pure heart” (in tantum innocens manibus et mundo corde).32 Herman’s and Seitha’s interactions with the relics are fundamentally different: while the monk’s rough handling of the clothes yields no delight and leads to the significant loss of holy blood, the anchoress has an intense sensory experience with garments that are suffused with the saint’s power.33 An analogous contrast between impure and pure bodies within the community of Bury St. Edmunds has been explored by Michael Widner in his article on a latetwelfth- and early-thirteenth-century chronicle of the abbey.34 While the chronicler barely mentions the massacre and expulsion of the Jewish population from the town in 1190, he lavishes attention on the body of St. Edmund and “the intimate physicality of the abbot’s interaction with the saint,” thus creating an antithesis between the abject “other” and the powerful figurehead of the religious community.35 It is striking that the earlier text, Goscelin’s miracle collection, treats a monk as abject and privileges not the pure touch of an abbot, but that of a lowly anchorite. But to what extent were Seitha’s “clean hands” and “pure heart”— the attributes that get her so close to the secondary relic—part of her anchoritic identity? I argue below that Goscelin presents us with three interconnected aspects of Seitha’s anchoritic spirituality: purity, humility, and servitude. While these qualities are by no means exclusive to the anchorite, Goscelin emphasizes the centrality of these virtues to the reclusive vocation in the Miracles of St. Edmund and the Liber confortatorius (The Book of Consolation, ca. 1080–1082), a letter of spiritual guidance addressed to his mentee, Eve of Wilton (ca. 1058–ca. 1125). Written a short time after Eve abruptly ended her acquaintance with Goscelin and relocated to Angers to become a recluse, this seemingly personal expression of love and loss is the earliest surviving example of anchoritic guidance literature written in England.36 Through31  GME, 2.5: 294–95.

32  GME, 2.5: 290–91 (see especially note 413).

33  For more on the relationship between anchorites and clothing, see Anna McKay, “‘Clothing and Female Reclusion in The Life of Mary of Egypt and The Life of Christina of Markyate,” Early Middle English 3, no. 1 (2021): 17–31. 34  Widner, “Samson’s Touch and a Thin Red Line.”

35  Widner, “Samson’s Touch and a Thin Red Line,” 345 and 353.

36  For the place of this text within the anchoritic literary tradition, see Mari-Hughes Edwards, “The Role of the Anchoritic Guidance Writer: Goscelin of St. Bertin,” in Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions, ed. Catherine Innes-Parker and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Religion

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out this article, I will compare it to the Seitha section of the Miracles of St. Edmund to illuminate the consistency of Goscelin’s thoughts on anchoritic virtues across time.

Seitha’s Anchoritic Identity

Seitha’s purity is borne from her virginity—specifically, her identity as a virginal sponsa Christi. In his introductory portrait of Seitha, Goscelin writes that, in spite of her noble background, Seitha spurned offers of marriage, and “abandoning every hope of worldly advance, [she] sought the heavenly bridegroom, the angels and the groom’s train, the nuptial song, and that new song of the followers of the lamb” (cunctam qua nitebatur spem deserens in seculo, sponsum quesiuit e celo; angelos, paranimphos, epythalamium, nouam illam agni sequacium melodiam).37 The allusions to Revelations 14:3 and the Song of Solomon here suggest that the young woman is part of an elect company of virgins whose eschatological reward will be intimate union with Christ. Goscelin further elaborates on Seitha’s past by presenting her as steadfast and loyal to her heavenly husband even before she enters her cell. Drawing on hagiographical topoi of the temptation of saints in the wilderness and the persecution of virgin martyrs, Goscelin tells of how Seitha was visited by the “seducer of virgins” (proditor castitatis), whose attempts to lure her into a marriage with someone of her own noble rank fail because she has chosen Jesus as her bridegroom (sponsu[s]).38 If she had bowed to parental pressure and entered into the bonds of a worldly marriage, Seitha would have performed the will of the devil. Her choice to become a recluse against the wishes of her relatives is inextricably linked to her decision to take a heavenly rather than an earthly—and, indeed, infernal—husband.39 This depiction of the recluse as the bride of Christ is consistent with the Book of Consolation, in which Goscelin equates Eve’s anchorhold with Christ’s “bedchamber” (cubiculum) where the anchoress can find refuge from the turbulence of the world.40 and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 31–45; Mari-Hughes Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 15–31; and Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life, Gender in the Middle Ages 6 (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2011), 84–92. For a discussion of authorial constructions of Eve’s solitude, see Kathryn Maude, “‘She Fled from the Uproar of the World’: Eve of Wilton and the Rhetorics of Solitude,” Magistra 21, no. 1 (2015): 36–50. 37  GME, 2.5: 274–75.

38  GME, 2.5: 274–75.

39  Goscelin tells us that it was her parents’ “will” to see her married (GME, 2.5: 274–75) and that she went into hiding from her relatives when she joined the community at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds (GME, 2.5: 276–77). In “The Women of Bury St Edmunds,” Van Houts discusses how the fear of being forced to marry a foreign man in the decades following the Conquest may have been one of the factors that pushed unmarried or widowed women into the religious vocation in Bury (59–62). However, she notes that we do not know whether Seitha’s suitors were English or foreign (64). 40  Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, ed. C. H. Talbot,

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Seitha’s anchoritic identity as the bride of Christ partly explains the purity of her touch. When Herman invites the congregation to kiss Edmund’s bloodied garment, Seitha is possessed by “a flaming desire to kiss the holy relics” (sacra deosculandi pignera ambitione flagranti).41 Her pious passion is rewarded with an experience so intense that it both stimulates and transcends the tactile and olfactory senses: “as she put forth her lips to kiss [the garment], such a sweet fragrance flooded over her that, as she always says, she thought it more than human senses could take” (cum ab osculandum ora porrigeret, tante se fragrantia suauitatis ut fateri solet inundari persensit, ut humanos excellere posse sensus putaretur).42 The description echoes an earlier part of the text, in which Goscelin gives an account of the reexhibition of St. Edmund’s body during the abbacy of Leofstan (1044–1065). When the relic is removed from its wooden coffin, an unusual perfume, “sweet beyond measure” (inestimabilis suauitatis), suffuses the abbey.43 Goscelin’s language is one of insatiability; the brethren, who were not within close proximity of the relics, “drank fully of the heavenly offering but could not get enough of it” (poterant quidem munere celesti repleri, sed non eadem poterant plenitudine satiari), suggesting that only spiritual union could satisfy their holy desire.44 While these monks suffer from a lack, Seitha receives an excess. In the act of touching the relic with one of the most intimate and sensitive parts of the flesh—the lips—the anchorite transforms a physical sensation into an affective response. Her kiss evokes the erotic imagery of Song of Solomon 1:2. As a heavenly bride, she is permitted intimate contact with relics which are, after all, an extension of the corpus Christi. This is quite unlike anything found in Ancrene Wisse. While analyses of that text by Innes-Parker and Robertson have suggested that mystical experience of the holy body can only take place in the mind’s eye, and after mortification of the sense of touch, Goscelin’s hagiography posits a subtly different relationship between the anchoress and the holy desire.45 Seitha does subdue her flesh by maintaining her virginity, but the text’s emphasis is less on the ascetic control over her body, and more on the transcendent yet highly physical sensation of handling the garments of Saint Edmund. It is not just Seitha’s status as a virgin that allows her to kiss her heavenly spouse through the medium of the relics; it is also her humility. Unlike Herman, Seitha does not handle the relics out of desire for monetary profit—she is motivated only by

Analecta monastica 3 / Studia Anselmiana 37 (1955): 1–117 at 89, hereafter Liber. Translation by W. R. Barnes and Rebecca Hayward in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis with W. R Barnes, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar, and Michael Wright, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 99–207 at 172, hereafter abbreviated as BC. 41  GME, 2.5: 288–89.

42  GME, 2.5: 288–89. 43  GME, 1.8: 204–5. 44  GME, 1.8: 204–5.

45  Innes-Parker, “Fragmentation and Reconstruction,” 39; Robertson, “Noli me tangere: The Enigma of Touch,” especially 30 and 36; Robertson, “‘This Living Hand,’” 34.

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devotion, and is richly rewarded for such purity of heart. Goscelin shows how the societal hierarchy is reversed at the moment of Herman’s demonstration: “you see the first become last and the last, first” ([v]ideres […] de primis nouissimos, de nouissimis primos fieri).46 His reference to the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:16) is a comment on how servants and youths, eager to be the first to touch the garment, struggle past their social superiors; it also suggests that the humble will be raised to glory. While others push ahead inconsiderately, Seitha’s “empty hands” (uacua manus) prevent her from rushing up to the altar.47 A metonym for her impoverished state, her “empty hands” show that she has no donation to offer in exchange for touching the relics. Her inability to give according to her desires, however, is a consequence of her choice to lead a “a life of poverty” (paup[er] uit[a]) within the small cottage at Bury.48 She is generously rewarded for her sacrifice. Goscelin tells us that she is able to borrow two pennies to offer on behalf of herself and her anchoritic companion. Like the widow of Mark’s gospel (Mark 12:41–44), her small offering proves more generous than a pile of gifts. It is the humility of poverty that allows her to touch one of the priceless treasures contained within the reliquary.49 Seitha’s humility is closely connected to the spiritual and bodily purity she attains as the reclusive bride of Christ. Goscelin’s metaphor of Seitha’s “clean hands” and “pure heart” are allusions to Vulgate Psalm 23:3–4: “who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord? The innocent in hands and clean of heart” (quis ascendet in montem Domini [?] innocens manibus et mundo corde).50 A related image of the humble devotee of Christ ascending a mountain to the heavenly city of Jerusalem appears in Goscelin’s Book of Consolation. Indeed, as Goscelin asserts throughout this text, Eve in her solitude must foster humility and spurn pride in order to enjoy the fruits of virtue: qui ergo amat ascendere in montem cum Domino uerum, et turrim edificare in celum, non in superbiam Babilonis, sed a conualle humilitatis induatur ex alto uirtute, et preparet sumptus necessarios totius longanimitatis et patientie.51

if anyone wishes to ascend the true mountain with the Lord, and to build a tower to heaven, not to the pride of Babylon, but from the valley of humility, let them be 46  GME, 2.5: 288–89.

47  GME, 2.5: 288–89. 48  GME, 2.5: 276–77. 49  GME, 2.5: 288–89.

50  Translation mine. The word “innocens” can be translated literally as “innocent” or “harmless,” and “mundo” literally as “clean,” but these words have also been translated as “clean” and “pure” respectively in the King James Version and the New International Version of the Bible, among others. In my discussion of The Miracles of St. Edmund, I follow Licence’s translation of GME, 2.5: 291, in which he renders “innocens” as “clean” and “mundo” as “pure.” In footnote 412, Licence notes that Goscelin refers to the same verse in a passage on the virginal pursuit of the heavenly bridegroom in the Vita S. Edithae (Life of St. Edith). 51  Goscelin, BC, 2.143.

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clothed in virtue from on high, and let them prepare the necessary provisions of all endurance and long-suffering.52

Goscelin is referring to the patience and suffering of the solitary, who was particularly vulnerable to taedia—holy melancholia. Not only did anchorites have to be wary of this sin, but they also had to avoid falling into the trap of the false pride that could attend ascetic endeavours.53 Seitha, whose solitary vocation deprived her of worldly riches and who blushes to approach the altar without a gift, embodies the virtues of innocence, meekness, and humility. These characteristics are evident even when she voices doubts about the incorruptibility of St. Edmund’s body earlier in book 2, chapter 5. In her own words, she describes her reaction when the sacrist, Toli, brings the topic of St. Edmund into one of their conversations: ego demisso uultu mulierbrem protestans pudorem, diutius disserentem sustinebam. Deinde rupto silentio, etsi procaciter, utiliter tamen in uoce efferata, quid est inquam domine mi quod nos incorruptum persistere, plerique cum corruptioni succumbere contendunt?54

I lowered my face, showed a woman’s modesty, and for a long time refrained from comment. Then, breaking my silence, impudently I know, but not without cause, I said in an exasperated voice, “Master, how can we argue that he remains incorrupt, when many say he has rotted?”

Seitha’s godly fear and maidenly meekness soften the blow of her question. She goes on to recall how, on her way to St. Edmund’s shrine, she met a knight who doubted and even denied the incorruption of the relics.55 She implores the knight to believe that the saint lies “intact” (incorruptus) and “undecayed” (integer).56 By her own admission, her beliefs are founded “simply on the grounds of our common faith and received wisdom” (iuxta communem magis fidem et uulgatam opinionem).57 This childlike faith in the cult of St. Edmund contrasts with the philosophical objections of the knight and the all-too-literal probing of Toli, who admits that he tested the integrity of the body of St. Edmund by pinching his soft flesh with “unclean” (impurus) and “unworthy” (indignis) hands and probing the body with “prying eyes” (petulantibus oculis).58 The words impurus and petulans, carrying connotations of moral corruption and wantonness, render the handling of the virginal, sacred body

52  Goscelin, Liber, 2.62. For a discussion of motifs of spiritual ascent in this work, see Rebecca Hayward and Stephanie Hollis, “The Anchorite’s Progress: Structure and Motif in the Liber Confortatorius,” in Writing the Wilton Women, ed. Hollis et al., 369–83 (especially 374). 53  See Goscelin, Liber, 4.96, BC, 4.181.

54  GME, 2.5: 278–79.

55  Licence, “The Cult of St Edmund,” 123–30, and Delbert Russell, “Articulating Saint Edmund the King at Bury St. Edmunds,” Early Middle English 1, no. 1 (2019), 55–70 at 56, explore the AngloNorman culture of scepticism surrounding the incorrupt status of Edmund’s whole-body relic. 56  GME, 2.5: 280–81.

57  GME, 2.5: 280–81. 58  GME, 2.5: 280–81.

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all the more shocking. Goscelin reports that, as a punishment for his disrespect, Toli fell to his death from the roof of the abbey, and those who acted as his accomplices in the act also perished within a year of their transgression.59 Less than thirty days after his death, Toli appeared to his fellow monk, Edwin, revealing that he was detained in a purgatorial state because he was dominum […] sanctum Eadmundum [...] contrectare non exhorrui[t], aliisque contuendum contrectandumue impudentur exposui[t], obsides fidei sensus magis corporeos quam uel maiorum auctoritatem uel diuine uirtutis acceptans maiestatem.60

not afraid to handle [the] lord St. Edmund and shamefully encouraged others to inspect him and handle him, accepting as pledges of faith the senses of the body rather than the authority of our ancestors or the grandeur of God’s power.

In other words, Toli touches the relics not as a means of heightening his devotion, but as a way of satisfying his doubts about the saint’s incorrupt status. His hands are “unclean and unworthy” because he trusts human senses above the authority of the written and oral miracle stories surrounding the cult. Seitha, however, maintains “clean” hands because she accepts the physical integrity of the body on the basis of pure faith and even perpetuates the cult by telling her own stories of miraculous encounters. Indeed, Seitha claims to have experienced the saint’s healing powers herself. Towards the beginning of the chapter, she recounts how God worked through the saint to mend her fractured finger and remove a tumour that had formed over the injury: lesamque protendens ad lecticam simpliciter dextram, uide aio domine an bene deceat in manum ancille tue gibba talis. Si tua foret uoluntas, eam auferri postularem.61 all I did was to extend my injured hand to his bier and say, “Look, Lord: is it seemly that your handmaid has such a swelling on her hand? If it is your will, I beg you to remove it.”

The term attributed to Seitha—ancilla, meaning “handmaid” or “servant”—provides another clue as to why she was able to enjoy the spiritual kiss. The term connects Seitha to her hagiographical predecessors, revealing her to be part of a line of devoted servants of St. Edmund who demonstrated their piety through care of, and intimate contact with, his relics. One such servant is Ælwine, a monk of the abbey whose acts of devotion are detailed in Herman and Goscelin’s miracle collections. He attended St. Edmund by washing him, combing his hair and keeping any loose hairs in a box as secondary relics.62 The language that Herman uses to describe Ælwine’s role—the “saint’s servant” (sancti famulus) and “chamber attendant” (cubicularius)—exemplifies 59  GME, 2.4: 272–73.

60  GME, 2.5: 284–87. 61  GME, 2.5: 276–77.

62  HME, 5: 18–19; GME, 1.4: 148–49.

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his holy subservience.63 As Tom Licence has suggested, this portrayal of him was based on an earlier account of a reclusive figure in Abbo of Fleury’s The Passion of St. Edmund—Oswen.64 According to Abbo, this “solitary woman” (solita femina) spent many years near St. Edmund’s tomb, fasting and reciting prayers.65 Alongside her ascetic and contemplative duties, Oswen performed the task of cutting the martyr’s hair and nails and collecting them in a small box, which she placed above the altar.66 Licence has proposed that Ælwine might have been Oswen’s anchoritic successor, occupying her cell and taking over her duty of maintaining the relics.67 Alternatively, Herman might have based his portrayal of Ælwine on Abbo’s depiction of the solita femina to emphasise the intimacy of his companionship with the saint.68 Another figure who devoted herself to St. Edmund is Ælfgyth.69 Although Herman and Goscelin do not explicitly state that Ælfgyth is responsible for caring for the physical form of St. Edmund, they suggest that she was the means by which interest in the relics was revived. This woman, mute from birth, prayed tirelessly before the saint’s relics until she miraculously gained the power of speech. Herman tells how, upon being cured, she “lived in religion near the saint’s shrine” (uiuens […] post hec circa sanctum religiose),70 and “anchored herself to the saint” (sancto adherebat) in service as his “handmaiden” (muliercul[a]).71 In this edition of Herman’s text, Licence translates “adherebat” as “anchored” to gesture towards Ælfgyth’s reclusive lifestyle; her proximity to the shrine and her dedication to the contemplative life suggest that she was one of a series of anchorites associated with the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds.72 In the later text, Goscelin uses the still more powerful metaphor of Ælfgyth as a living “victim” (hosti[a]) giving herself to the saint “in sacrifice” (holocaustum), who “vowed never to retreat in the slightest from the martyr’s service” (nunquam ab obsequela martyris uel ad modicum recessuram se deuotauit).73 In a reversal of her mutism, Ælfgyth was even blessed with the ability to converse with the saint; it was through her that Edmund revealed the importance of promoting his cult. The disgruntled martyr appeared to Ælfgyth three times, instructing her to alert Abbot Leofstan of the lamentable state of his cobweb-strewn shrine. 63  HME, 5: 18–19.

64  In Hermits and Recluses, Licence suggests that Oswen was a recluse at the minster, occupying a cell which communicated with the chancel (76). He also draws the connection between portrayals of Oswen and Ælwine in his edition of the Miracles of St. Edmund (xxiii–xxiv and 18n81). 65  Abbo, Passio S. Eadmundi 14, 1:82.

66  Abbo, Passio S. Eadmundi 14, 1:83.

67  Licence, Miracles of St Edmund, xxiii (see also 18n81). 68  Licence, Miracles of St Edmund, xxiv. 69  HME, 22: 52–53; GME, 1.8: 200–1. 70  HME, 22: 50–51.

71  HME, 22: 50–53.

72  Licence discusses Ælfgyth’s reclusion in Hermits and Recluses, 83. 73  GME, 1.8: 200–201.

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Her messages to Abbot Leofstan lead to another instructive example of the contrast between pious and impious touching. Both Herman and Goscelin relate how Abbot Leofstan attempted to rectify his neglect by summoning Ælwine to inspect St. Edmund’s relics.74 Almost blind in his old age, Ælwine explored the relics through touch, finding the saint still intact and dressed in the arrow-pierced, blood-stained garment in which he had suffered martyrdom.75 His gentle and respectful handling of the relics contrasts with Abbot Leofstan’s rough touch. The abbot wished to test the veracity of the claims that Edmund’s severed head fused with his body. He tugged at it, and was punished with paralysis in both hands, “perhaps,” ventures Herman, “because such an action pleased neither God nor the saint” (fortasis quod fuerat actum, nec Deo nec sancto beneplacitum).76 In his retelling of Leofstan’s transgression, Goscelin vehemently asserts the moral of the tale: Non […] ad distrahenda uel diuaricanda reuerenda testis Christi membra, sed ad curanda honorifice atque condienda fuerat inuitatus. […] quantum fuerit dubitasse nefas.77

he had not been appointed to tear apart or tug the venerable members of Christ’s witnesses, but to treat them respectfully and preserve them. […] To doubt so much is a sin.

In Goscelin’s account of the story, Leofstan was afflicted with blurred vision—a sign of his moral blindness—and slurred speech, which was perhaps a punishment for instructing his brethren to help him test the cohesion of the limbs. While both of these afflictions healed in time, “his hands remained withered to recall his presumption” (manuum ariditate ad testimonium presumptionis permanente).78 By adding these extra details, Goscelin highlights the poor state of Abbot Leofstan’s moral condition and further draws our attention towards his motif of hands as a metonym of the flesh’s will.

Conclusion

Devotion, humility, and servitude: these three aspects of Seitha’s anchoritic identity make her close contact with the relic morally permissible. Yet, as Goscelin demonstrates in the Book of Consolation, one does not have to be a recluse or a virgin in order to receive spiritual rewards from physical contact with God and his saints. In Book 4, a discussion of humility, Goscelin uses the example of Mary Magdalene to show that a humble “prostitute” deserves to be healed from the “wounds of her sins,” while a proud Pharisee stands condemned: 74  HME, 22: 52–55; GME, 1.8: 200–203. 75  HME, 22: 54–55; GME, 1.8: 202–203. 76  HME, 22: 54–55.

77  GME, 1.8: 206–7. 78  GME, 1.8: 206–7.

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illa peccatrix, cuius tactum immundi pharisei tanquam inmunditiam abhorrebant, non solum Domini nestigia tangit, uerum etiam caput de maiori cordis flagrantia nardis imbuit, plenis manibus perungit, crines suauissimis odoribus inuoluit, infundit, permulcet, gratificat, comit, componit, atque respersa de uertice saluatoris suauitas totam domum repleuit.79

that sinful woman, whose touch the unclean Pharisees abhorred as if it were uncleanness, not only touches the feet of the Lord but also anoints his head with nard from the greater fragrance of her heart; she anoints him from full hands. She covers his hair with very sweet odours; she pours; she strokes; she pleases him; she combs; she arranges, and the sweetness spread out from the head of the Saviour and filled the whole house.80

Mary Magdalene’s tactility, and the sweet fragrance that issues from the body she touches, provides a striking parallel to Seitha’s kiss and the scent of St. Edmund’s holy garment. The similarity is heightened by Goscelin’s appellation of Magdalene as a “very devoted handmaid” (devotissima famula).81 The example suggests that, as long as a servant of Christ demonstrates sufficient humility and loving dedication, they are permitted to touch, stroke, and kiss holy bodies. Goscelin’s depiction of Mary Magdalene differs from the portrayals of her prohibition from touching Christ in the garden, a motif that Robertson associates with the later AB texts.82 In the Book of Consolation, it is Magdalene’s sensory, even sensual, handling of Christ, rather than her lack of touching, that leads to the expansion of her mind and enhancement of her senses. In other parts of the letter to Eve, Goscelin champions tactile spirituality. Describing how Christ appeared to his disciples following his resurrection, he states that he “offered himself to be seen and felt” (uidendum et palpandum se prebuerit) in order to convey his love for them and provide comfort at a time of mourning.83 This long goodbye, sweetened by physical contact, was denied to Goscelin when his spiritual mentee left suddenly for Angers. And because they were thus physically separated, the text acted as a poor substitute until God could “join together again one soul of two people” in heaven (unicam aliquando duorum animam resolidabit).84 Although written many years apart, Goscelin’s letter to a fledgling anchoress and his portrayal of a recluse at Bury share features that suggest an ongoing fascination with the power of physical contact. For Goscelin, touch was not necessarily something to be avoided—it was both an expression of spiritual devotion and a means by which intimacy with the divine could be achieved. 79  Goscelin, Liber, 4.101.

80  Goscelin, BC, 4.187.

81  Goscelin, Liber, 4.101; BC, 4.187.

82  Robertson, “Noli me tangere: The Enigma of Touch.”

83  Goscelin, Liber, 1.31; BC, 1.107.

84  Goscelin, Liber, 1.27; BC, 1.101. Goscelin suggests that the book is a substitute for his physical presence in Liber 1.45 (BC, 1.122). In “The Anchoritic Body at Prayer in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius,” Early Middle English, 3, no.1 (2021): 101–14, Alicia Smith picks up on a different strand of Goscelin’s rhetoric that suggests that the book is a material embodiment of his grief, which Eve can send up to God as a prayer along with her own sighs and tears. In this reading, the text signifies Goscelin’s continuing presence, rather than his absence.

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Sophie Sawicka-Sykes is an independent scholar who completed her PhD at the University of East Anglia. Her research focuses on the reception and transformation of late antique ideas of holiness in early England, and how sensory experience of the divine contributed to the construction of sainthood and cults. She has written and published on the songs of angels and righteous souls, heavenly communities, and demonic “antimusic” in hagiographical and anchoritic texts.

MARY, SILENCE, AND THE FICTIONS OF POWER IN ANCRENE WISSE 2.269–481 JOSHUA S. EASTERLING

The second part of Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), a thirteenth-century text of spiritual guidance composed for English anchoresses, contains that work’s most extensive teachings on the importance of maintaining silence and of refraining from excessive speech generally.1 In turning to the subject, Ancrene Wisse at once continues and brilliantly reorients a textual tradition that sought to manage the anchoritic voice by limiting and redirecting its several modes of expression.2 These in turn emerged within both spiritual and material contexts, from moral instruction to gossip, and from confession to the regular management of physical needs. Although they required periods of silent listening, such activities never excluded anchoresses’ active and vocal participation despite many textual reminders that, for example, they should be quicker to listen to sound instruction than to offer it.3 In this respect, Ancrene Wisse is not unique: few writers of late-medieval anchoritic guidance texts forewent the opportunity to address, and to curtail, the frequent visitations to the anchorhold by advice-seeking spiritual clients, as well as by local clergy and religious, who at times received such instruction from anchorites even when it was not requested. 1  For general discussion of the text’s origins and readership, see Bella Millett, Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature: II. Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group, and the Wooing Group (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), 6–17, and “The Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions,” Medium Ævum 61, no. 2 (1992): 206–28; see also Elizabeth Robertson, “‘This Living Hand’: Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist Immanence, and the Reader of the Ancrene Wisse,” Speculum 78, no. 1 (2003): 1–36 at 4–12. The long critical tradition starting in the nineteenth century that has argued for the text’s Dominican authorship has been revived and cogently supported most recently by Bella Millett, Annotated Bibliographies, 7–15, and her “The Origins of Ancrene Wisse.” Nonetheless, the Ancrene-author’s institutional affiliation is at times still treated as an open question; see, for example, Robertson, “‘This Living Hand,’” 1 and 12. 2  Among the most important texts within this tradition written in England is Ælred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum (A Rule for a Recluse), which opens by addressing (and sharply criticizing) anchoresses’ engagements with local visitors. See Ælredus Rieuallensis, De institutione inclusarum, ed. C. H. Talbot, in Ælredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaeualis 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 637–82.

3  On the various networks wherein anchorites negotiated solitude and their engagement with wider communities, see Joshua Easterling, “Knocking in the Usual Manner: Inquiries, Interrogations, and the Desire for Advice in Anchoritic Culture,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 44, no. 2 (2018): 148–69; and Medieval Anchorites in their Communities, ed. Cate Gunn and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: Brewer, 2017). At work was anchorites’ strongly liminal environment, that is, their social and intellectual placement between clerical (and monastic) culture, on the one hand, and secular or lay society, on the other. See note 30 below.

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Below I examine the text’s response to this culture of visitation and to the compromises that it required from a regulatory prioritization of silence. This essay also intervenes in recent examinations of anchoritic reading as one of many points of intersection between the inner and intellectual lives of enclosed women, on the one hand, and the expressly material (here bookish) quality of their vocation, on the other.4 While the cell that enclosed anchoritic (as also monastic) bodies was an integral feature of medieval “Christian materiality,” as it has been examined by Caroline Walker Bynum, the access of enclosed women to books, and specifically biblical writings, reminds us of the close relationship between such women’s spiritual and material lives.5 In addressing medieval religious women’s literacy, ownership of books, and in particular their practices of scriptural interpretation, Jocelyn WoganBrowne has observed that despite the challenge of tracing which texts women were assumed to have accessed, many writings directly “incorporate explicit reading models for [women’s] study of scripture.”6 At still another level, the culture of visitation allowed for an energetic interplay between anchoresses’ inner vocation and their concrete and material lives. It is here, too, that Ancrene Wisse recognizes, and even creates a space for, the intellectual virtuosity of enclosed holy women, who frequently came to imitate and even rival the authority of the local clergy by developing their function as spiritual instructors to those who visited the anchoritic cell. In doing so, Ancrene Wisse draws from a Marian sermon composed by the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), which advances the monastic imperatives of silence by underscoring that the Virgin Mary speaks in the Gospels on only four occasions. This essay extends recent critical interest in the Ancrene-author’s borrowings from Bernard and further elucidates the many “complex ways in which Scripture inhabits” this text.7 My reading considers the work’s deployment of the Annunciation to reinforce teachings on silence, and to link Mary with the anchoress through a highly nuanced conception of spiritual and verbal agency. So exemplary is her silence at the Annunciation that it serves, in the author’s formulation, as a model “to alle wummen” (to all women).8 However, the image of feminine silence 4  My reflections here and below are guided by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Women’s Formal and Informal Traditions of Biblical Knowledge in Anglo-Norman England,” in Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies: Festschrift in Honour of Anneke Mulder-Bakker on the Occasion of her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 85–109; and Robertson, “‘This Living Hand,’” 23–36. 5  See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011). 6  Wogan-Browne, “Women’s Formal and Informal Traditions,” 93.

7  Nicholas Perkins, “Reading the Bible in Sawles Warde and Ancrene Wisse,” Medium Ævum 72, no. 2 (2003): 207–37 at 207.

8  All quotations are from Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), here 2.442 at vol. 1, p. 31 (hereafter AW). Translations are from Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), here 31 (hereafter Guide).



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departs in striking ways from that found in Bernard’s sermon. In responding to the culture of visitation, Ancrene Wisse recasts Cistercian Mariology and, by reworking Bernard’s investments in the Annunciation, reconfigures the anchoress’s (at times competing) identities and the very conditions of spiritual imitatio. As Ancrene Wisse makes clear, while the anchoress was to modulate her voice and heed the regulatory calls for silence, that same voice was indispensable and intimately bound together with the material concerns of bodily sustenance and the physical world within and beyond the enclosure. (At its very opening, for example, Ancrene Wisse instructs readers to intone their morning hymns while kneeling upon their beds.) Even as it is to be carefully modulated, the anchoress’s voice serves as a link between her inner spiritual life and a body that was already an extension of the world of solid matter. In other words, voice matters since its expression was structured in part by the body’s material surroundings, yet the silencing of that same voice was also a means of directing attention toward the exploration of spiritual (and decidedly non-material) interiorities. In this way, and in negotiating material and non-material realities, the voice and regulatory efforts to manage it together form part of the various material technologies of anchoritic embodiment.

Rival Models: Eve, Mary, and Imitatio Clerici

The explicit contrasts between Mary and Eve that thematically structure the early sections of Part 2 of Ancrene Wisse offer as models of imitation two distinct and clearly delineated forms of verbal agency.9 However, the anchoress is of course to recognize only one of these biblical exemplars, namely Mary, as a viable candidate for imitation.10 Meanwhile, the argument that many “clucking anchoresses” (cakelinde ancres) become incautiously effusive in their social interactions, and above all with clerics, is set within Ancrene Wisse’s discussion of sacramental penance.11 That is, the anchoress is first offered two biblical scenes as models for interacting with her confessor—Eve’s temptation by the serpent in the garden (Genesis 3:1–4) and Mary’s encounter with the archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38)— although the cultural imperatives of imitatio Mariae urgently recommend that she choose the latter. Indeed, earlier anchoritic writings had likewise presented Mary as a mirror for anchoresses.12 By contrast and in a striking image, the choice of Eve 9  For discussion of this section of the work, see Alexandra Barratt, “The Five Wits and their Structural Significance in Part II of Ancrene Wisse,” Medium Ævum 56, no. 1 (1987): 12–24. 10  While this significantly reduces the number of spiritual models that are made available to anchoresses, at least in this portion of Ancrene Wisse, elsewhere the author also directs their attention to the exemplarity of Mary Magdalene. See AW, 6.354–57 at 140–41.

11  AW, 2.295 at 27; Guide, 27. The author does not address confession in a formal and systematic manner until Part 5. See Bella Millett, “Ancrene Wisse and the Conditions of Confession,” English Studies 80, no. 3 (1999): 193–215.

12  For Mary’s place in these texts, see Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, ed. C. H. Talbot, Analecta monastica 3 / Studia Anselmiana 37 (1955): 1–117 at 83; and Ælred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, 477ff. On imitatio Mariae in late-medieval religious

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over Mary determines the extent to which the anchoress was endangered by her extensive verbal exchanges with her confessor, who here functions as an ensnaring serpent.13 Her identity shifts once she aspires to match her confessor “word for word” (word aӡein word) and make herself into a spiritual “master,” a term to which the author will shortly return.14 What effectively amounts to a form of imitatio clerici is possible only because the anchoress does not possess a proper degree of holy fear: “Eue wiðute dred spec wið þe neddre; vre Leafdi wes offearet of Gabrieles speche” (Eve talked fearlessly with the serpent; our Lady was frightened by Gabriel’s speech).15 In all, then, by sharply reproaching the anchoress who imitates and even rivals the intellectual power of her confessor by demonstrating a verbal agency that resembles his own, the text argues that she in fact has three potential models—the priest, Eve, and Mary.16 Yet in what ways might the anchoress have matched her confessor, and in what sense was such behaviour (at least potentially) so perilous that it warrants the implicit comparison of the priest with the serpent in the garden? To begin, the anchoress is reminded that, as a woman, she should not attempt to preach or teach, despite the opportunities presented by her visitors to do so. Beyond serving as evidence that at least certain anchoresses did precisely this, this restriction is almost immediately nuanced and refined to permit teaching in particular instances: the anchoress is above all not to teach men. On the other hand, the most “secure” (siker) mode of spiritual interaction available to her remains the counsel that she offers to other women.17 Ancrene Wisse, like other late medieval religious writings, only loosely distinguishes between teaching, counsel, and preaching.18 At the same time, the author qualifies his instruction to avoid counselling men, or preaching to them, since nowhere is this more important than when the anchoress interacts with her priest: culture, see Laura Saetveit Miles, The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2020), especially chapter 1; and with reference to the thirteenth century, see Catherine M. Mooney, “Imitatio Christi or Imitatio Mariae? Claire of Assisi and Her Interpreters,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 52–77 at 58–60. In connection with Ælred’s De institutione, see Laura Saetveit Miles, “The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation,” Speculum 89, no. 3 (2014): 632–69 at 666–68.

13  Brief comment on this passage is provided by Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2004), 175. 14  AW, 2.278 at 27; Guide, 27.

15  AW, 2.309–10 at 28; Guide, 28.

16  AW, 2.284–310 at 27–28. 17  AW, 2.372 at 29.

18  The distinction of preaching from other forms of spiritual instruction is inextricably connected with the question of authorization, which came to occupy a central place especially within the thirteenth-century culture of academic discourse and inquiry. For an overview of arguments and literature with particular reference to England, see Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–35; and Claire M. Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).



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Ne preachi ӡe to na mon; ne mon ne easki ow cunsail ne ne telle ow. Readeð wummen ane. Seint Pawel forbeot wummen to preachin: Mulieres non permitto docere. Na wepmon ne chastie ӡe, ne edwiten him his unþeaw bute he beo þe ouer-cuðre. Halie alde ancres hit mahe don summes weis, ah hit nis nawt siker þing, ne ne limpeð nawt to ӡunge. Hit is hare meoster þe beoð ouer oþre iset ant habbeð ham to witene as Hali Chirche larewes. Ancre naueð forte wite bute hire and hire meidnes. Halde euch his ahne meoster, ant nawt ne reaui oþres. Moni weneð to do wel þe deð al to wundre; for as Ich seide ear, vnder semblant of god is ofte ihulet sunne. Þurh swuch chastisement haueð sum ancre arearet bitweonen hire ant hire preost oðer a falsinde luue oðer a muche weorre.

You should not preach to anyone; and men should not ask you for advice or confide in you. Only counsel women. St Paul forbids women to preach: I do not permit women to teach. You should not rebuke any man, or reproach him for his sin, unless he is over-familiar. Holy old anchoresses may to some extent, but it is not a safe thing to do, and is not appropriate for the young. It is the job [meoster] of those who are placed over others and are responsible for them as teachers of Holy Church. An anchoress is responsible for no-one but herself and her maids. Each should keep to their own job [meoster], and not take over the other’s. Often someone who means well does a great deal of harm; for as I said before, sin is often hidden under the appearance of virtue. Through rebukes of this kind an anchoress has sometimes aroused between herself and her priest either a treacherous love or a bitter feud.19

The anchoress had earlier been presented as attempting to instruct her confessor and become his master; hence the author’s pun here (on “meoster” and “maistre”) also suggests that one should have her own master and not deprive others of theirs.20 That is, the author’s guidance about preaching to men also pertains to the interactions between the anchoress and her priest, wherein she may be tempted to flex her spiritual muscle and exercise a mode of vocal agency that resembles his own. Indeed, the voice that the anchoress seeks to appropriate is not strictly speaking her own once she adopts the voice of her confessor and either becomes his “meistre” (master) or takes his “meoster” (job), thereby appropriating for herself a function otherwise restricted to clerical elites. Moreover, in urging the anchoress once again not to occupy that position of spiritual mastery, this passage implies, though only elliptically, the dangers and unintended consequences that might pursue an anchoress who incautiously disregards these warnings and seeks to teach others. The point that the anchoress’s incautious speech and moral chastisements might generate conflict (“muche weorre”) with her priest can only be fully understood in the context of spiritual power, in striving for which she seeks to appropriate for herself that very status as teacher, or preacher. As suggested above, these arguments build upon the author’s earlier discussion of anchoresses’ interactions with their confessors and supplement those teachings: whereas Eve and Mary represent rival models of vocal agency, it is only in following Eve—that is, in speaking excessively and incautiously—that the anchoress risks mirroring, imitating, and 19  AW, 2.368–79 at 29–30; Guide, 29–30.

20  The point that an anchoress is not to teach priests, who are in fact to be her teachers, is echoed by Walter Hilton; see The Scale of Perfection, Book 1, lines 2402–403, ed. Thomas H. Bestul (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000).

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thus closely resembling her priest.21 As we will see, the Ancrene-author carefully elaborates these points in arguing that, by failing to imitate Mary, the anchoress not only refuses a particular form of imitatio sancti but—and far more seriously— courts the perils of imitatio clerici.22 The saint operates here and throughout as a means of helping the anchoress to reconceptualize her own spiritual agency and cautiously negotiate her material circumstances; in doing so, she will avoid both sexual dangers (“falsinde luue”) and conflicts with learned men. By warning the anchoress against preaching, the Ancrene-author substantially elaborates the contrast between Eve and Mary together with its implications for how anchoresses conceived of their agency. I suggest further that anchoresses at times adopted a function as teachers or preachers primarily on account of the exceptional status and power with which that function invested them. The elaborate use of Mary’s example, and especially her conduct at the Annunciation as a model for the anchoritic reader, is addressed in the essay by Alicia Smith in this volume.23 In Ancrene Wisse, Mary’s Annunciation is intended above all to reimagine the various forms of spiritual agency from a perspective radically different from that of the author’s source for his extensive discussion of the Annunciation—Bernard of Clairvaux. More specifically, the example of Eve and the dangers that attended her interactions with the serpent allow a framework for distinguishing the fictions of spiritual power from its genuine substance. As the author provides example and counterexample, a model to imitate and one to avoid, both presuppose the form(s) of vocal agency to which the anchoress might aspire. The author’s argument, however, is that only one model—that of the Virgin Mary—will ultimately lend her the spiritual power that she seeks.

Bernard, Mary, and the Annunciation The urgent reminders that anchoresses are not to imitate the clerical voice rely heavily on a rather innovative reading of the Annunciation, which is set within the Ancrene-author’s extensive borrowings from Bernard’s sermon for the Octave of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. While the Gospels rank among the author’s 21  The relationship between holy women and their confessors was frequently marked by compromise and struggle. As an excellent general overview of the subject, the study by Janette Dillon is still, in my view, unsurpassed. See “Holy Women and Their Confessors or Confessors and Their Holy Women? Margery Kempe and Continental Tradition,” in Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), 115–40. On this relationship in the lives of specific holy women, see also John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 22  On the intersection of gender, devotion, and imitatio clerici, albeit within a fourteenth-century (and Lollard) context, see Nicole R. Rice, “Devotional Literature and Lay Spiritual Authority: Imitatio Clerici in Book to a Mother,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 2 (2005): 187–216.

23  Alicia Smith, “The Anchoritic Body at Prayer in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius,” Early Middle English 3, no. 1 (2021): 101–14.



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primary biblical sources, his use of the Psalms is far more extensive, as Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson have shown.24 Yet by the thirteenth century, the image of Mary emerged in its cultural and spiritual stature as a powerful anchoritic text, and Mary herself as a model for anchoresses across Europe.25 Laura Saetveit Miles has recently shown the immense significance that the Annunciation within anchoritic life and culture.26 For its part, and in following Bernard’s lead, Ancrene Wisse departs strikingly from earlier uses of Mary, for example by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (ca. 1035–ca. 1107) and Ælred of Rievaulx (1110/12–1167). In his Liber confortatorius (Book of Consolation, ca. 1080), which was composed for the anchoress Eve of Wilton,27 Goscelin observes that, “rejoicing” in the angelic message, Mary “entered the synagogue chanting the following psalm: ‘I was glad when they said to me, let us go into the house of the Lord.’”28 By contrast, Ælred of Rievaulx, whose De institutione inclusarum (Rule for a Recluse) also discusses the Annunciation, prefers a largely silent Mary; in fact, he closely follows Bernard in his representation of the Virgin.29 In following the lead of twelfth-century Cistercian Mariology, Ancrene Wisse stands here as elsewhere poised at the intersection of monastic and more strictly anchoritic ideals, since Bernard’s concerns lie above all with the Virgin’s exemplary silence.30 Bernard insists on demonstrating, and even proving (probamus), that the 24  See Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, ed. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist, 1991), 435–42. However, see also Perkins, “Reading the Bible,” 266n16.

25  The German anchoress Margaret the Lame is said to have been taught to read by none other than the Virgin Mary. See Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy; Juliana of Cornillon, Author of the Corpus Christi Feast; and Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, trans. Jo Ann McNamara et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 314–15. 26  Miles, The Virgin Mary’s Book, chapter 2.

27  For discussion of Eve, see Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis with W. R Barnes, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar, and Michael Wright, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 341ff. See also Smith, “The Anchoritic Body at Prayer,” in this volume.

28  Liber confortatorius, ed. Talbot, 83.26–27; Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Liber confortatorius: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, trans. Monika Otter (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 101.

29  I show this in an article that is near completion: “Bernard of Clairvaux, the Annunciation, and Ælred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum.” More generally, Ælred’s sermons are remarkable examples of Cistercian Mariology and go far in helping to account for the attention that he gives the saint in the De institutione. For discussion, see Shawn Madison Krahmer, “Ælred of Rievaulx and the Feminine in the Marian Sermons for the Feasts of the Assumption and Purification,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2000): 459–78, and “Mary as Mother and Bride in the Liturgical Sermons of Ælred of Rievaulx (First and Second Clairvaux Collections),” American Benedictine Review 58, no. 3 (2007): 280–98.

30  On the interactions of monastic and anchoritic concerns, see esp. Alexandra Barratt, “Anchoritic Aspects of Ancrene Wisse,” Medium Ævum 49, no. 1 (1980): 32–56. That anchorites were so often situated between monastic and lay culture demonstrates the strongly “liminal” status of their vocation. For discussion, see Michelle M. Sauer, “Anchoritism, Liminality, and the Boundaries of Vocational Withdrawal,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 42, no. 1 (2016): v–xii.

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saint was modest in restraining from verbal excess. In this way, his use of Mary as a proof of monastic virtues anticipates the image’s later development during the thirteenth century and beyond.31 That Mary was modest we prove from the Gospel. For where was she at any time loquacious, where is she seen to have been presumptuous? […] In fact in every text of the four Gospels, if we well recall, Mary is heard speaking but four times. First indeed to the angel, but only since he had spoken once and then again to her; the second time to Elizabeth, when the voice of her salutation made John leap in her womb, and with the same magnifying Mary, she sought more to magnify the Lord (Luke 1:34–55); the third time to her son, when he was just twelve years old, for she and his father had sought him grievingly (Luke 2:48); and the fourth time, to her son and the servants at the wedding feast (John 2:3–5).32

Bernard’s observation that, throughout the Gospels, Mary speaks on no more than four occasions serves his argument on behalf of her exemplary humility and modesty. Most important for the abbot was her possession of these virtues, which, while lending Mary spiritual authority, in his view did not invest her with any particular form of power or agency that was not already implied by the virtues themselves. None of her spiritual efficacy in fact resided in her speech, according to Bernard, and so its absence in no way diminishes—indeed it enhances—her stature.33 This treatment of Mary, however, undergoes transformation through Ancrene Wisse’s rather striking revisions to the Bernardine sermon—revisions that, at first glance, lend the impression that its author had misread, in fact badly misread, his source. Her virtues remain discernible, though they no longer occupy centre stage and have instead been displaced by the author’s decision to prioritize the saint’s power. In its borrowing from Bernard, Ancrene Wisse underscores not so much Mary’s silence as a demonstration or “proof” of her virtue, but rather the power and effects of her speech, not only despite but precisely on account of its brevity (“for se selt speche”). The point, that Mary did not behave like the cleric-imitating anchoress when she was visited by the angel, links the Annunciation to the text’s discourse 31  Bernard’s statement of “proof” importantly recalls the use of medieval holy women as “proof of orthodoxy.” See Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Bernard was clearly unsettled by the fact that Mary speaks as many as four times. He notes, for example, that she spoke only after the angel had addressed her not once but twice, as if silence would have been appropriate even here, if the angel had not taken the initiative and so clearly elicited her response.

32  Dominica infra octavam Assumptionis B. V. Mariae, Sermo 10: “Pudibunda fuit Maria: ex Evangelio id probamus. Ubi enim aliquando loquax, ubi præsumptuosa fuisse videtur? […] In omni denique textu quatuor Evangeliorum, si bene meminimus, nonnisi quater Maria loquens auditur. Primo quidem ad angelum, sed cum jam semel atque iterum allocutus eam fuisset: secundo, ad Elisabeth, quando vox salutationis ejus Joannem exsultare fecit in utero, et ea magnificante Mariam, ipsa magis Dominum magnificare curavit: tertio, ad Filium, cum jam esset annorum duodecim, quod ipsa et pater ejus dolentes quæsissent eum: quarto, in nuptiis ad Filium et ministros.” Cited from S. Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and N. M. Rochais, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977).

33  For recent discussion of Bernard’s negotiation of gender, including his Marian images, see Line Cecilie Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: Performing the Bride (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).



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of caution, but also to holy women’s aspiration to the varieties of spiritual agency and power that involved teaching or preaching in some form.34 Vre deorewurðe Leafdi, seinte Marie, þe ah to alle wummen to beo forbisne, wes of se lutel speche þet nowher in Hali Writ ne finde we þet ha spec bute fowr siðen; ah for se selt speche hire wordes weren heuie ant hefden muche mihte […] Hire forme wordes þet we redeð of weren þa ha ondswerede Gabriel þen engel; ant teo weren se mihtie þet wið þet ha seide, Ecce ancilla domini; fiat michi secundum uerbum tuum, ed tis word Godes sune ant soð Godd bicom mon, and te Lauerd þet al þe world ne mahte nawt bifon bitunde him inwið hire meidnes wombe. Hire oþre wordes weren þa ha com ant grette Elyzabeth hire mehe; ant hwet mihte wes icud ed þeose wordes? Hwet? Þet a child bigon to pleien toӡeines ham—þet wes Sein Iuhan—in his moder wombe. Idem: Vox eius Iohannem exultare fecit in utero. Þet þridde time þet ha spec wes ed te neoces; ant ter þurh hire bisocne wes weater iwent to wine. Þe feorðe time wes þa ha hefde imist hire sune ant eft him ifunde; ant hu muche wunder folhede þeose wordes? Þet Godd almihti beah to mon, to Marie ant to Ioseph, to a smið ant to a wummon, and folhede ham ase heoren hwider-se ha walden. Neomeð nu her ӡeme, ant leornið ӡeorne her-bi hu seltsene speche haueð muche strengðe.

Our precious Lady, holy Mary, who should be an example to all women, spoke so little that nowhere in Scripture do we find that she spoke more than four times; but because she spoke so seldom, her words were weighty and had great power […] The first words of hers that we read about were when she answered the angel Gabriel; and those were so powerful that when she said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; may it happen to me according to your word, at these words the son of God and true God became man, and the Lord whom all the world could not contain enclosed himself inside her virgin womb. Her second speech was when she came and greeted her kinswoman Elizabeth; and what power was shown in these words? Why, that a child began to leap for joy in response to them—that was Saint John—in his mother’s womb. The same: Her voice made John leap for joy in the womb. The third time that she spoke was at the wedding-feast; and there at her request water was turned into wine. The fourth time was when she had lost her son and found him again; and how great a marvel followed these words? That almighty God submitted to man, to Mary and to Joseph, to a workman and to a woman, and followed them as theirs wherever they wanted. Now pay attention here, and be willing to learn from this how infrequent speech has great power.35

This is hardly the only time that the Ancrene-author draws from the sermons of Bernard.36 Here and elsewhere he follows his source closely, though he also, in Bella Millett’s formulation, “makes significant changes to the emphasis of the original.”37 In this reworking of Cistercian Mariology, Bernard’s emphases, including his description of the Virgin’s modesty (pudibunda), have largely been eliminated and replaced by the argument that her speech carried an extraordinary efficacy. Much resembling the material body or relics of any miracle-working saint, Mary’s words 34  AW, 2.287–91 at 27; Guide, 27. My emphases, in both the Middle English and the translation, are indicated by boldface and underscoring. See also Easterling, “Knocking in the Usual Manner,” 162. 35  AW, 2.442–63 at 31–32; Guide, 31–32.

36  Bella Millett, “Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection,” Leeds Studies in English 33 (2002): 53–76 at 66–67. 37  Millett, “The Life of Perfection,” 67.

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in fact have the power to effect “muche wunder” (great marvel[s]). For as the author notices, it is through her response to the archangel Gabriel—Ecce, ancilla domini; fiat michi secundum verbum tuum—that “the son of God and true God became man.” With a power that recalls the priest’s capacity to bring about the Eucharistic miracle, Mary’s words quite literally have the “mihte” to make God man. This single example of her immense and more or less miraculous influence is no exception; the Ancrene-author reads each subsequent instance of Mary’s speech as similarly marvellous and above all mighty: her greeting of her kinswoman Elizabeth (Luke 1:40–41); her remarks to Jesus at the wedding at Cana (John 2:3–5); and her mild reproach to Jesus after the twelve-year-old boy remained in Jerusalem (Luke 2:48). This use of Cistercian spirituality and the specific repurposing of Bernard is guided by far more than the paradoxical idea that the exercise of verbal agency often reduces rather than increases the power of the speaker.38 For those who could not confirm that insight with reference to their own experience, Mary’s exemplarity offered a compromise—a middle ground between maintaining strict silence and engaging in the forms of disruptive and perilous loquacity that the Ancrene-author understood to be an established feature of anchoritic culture. His foremost concern, as we have seen, was to manage the anchoress’s assumption of verbal agency as a way of mirroring the spiritual authority of her priest. The point that silence brings strength was so important that the author underscores it repeatedly in the passages following these borrowings from Bernard. He reiterates this emphasis on strength (466–68 and 474–78), offering as well the hope that the anchoress, “because of her silence, […] will sing sweetly in heaven” (schal singen, þurh hire silence, sweteliche in heouene).39 At work is the “paradox of simultaneous humility and exaltation” that, as Line Cecilie Engh has observed, characterized material representations of Mary.40 Meanwhile, the anchoress comes to resemble Mary in still other ways. To the extent that anchoritic culture was oriented around the salvation of anchorites themselves as well as of those in their local communities, the Virgin could serve as a mirror and example to be imitated. Few medieval recluses doubted that to instruct or otherwise encourage members of their community was also to use the power of their status in a way designed to assist in the salvation of their fellow Christians. At the same time, Ancrene Wisse clearly seeks to curtail this function, not by arguing categorically for strict silence but by seeking to moderate and redirect the assumption that to be invested in the salvation of another was to speak volubly with that person. The anchoress is to take note of the fact that the few words uttered by the Virgin at the Annunciation were sufficient for bringing forth the Saviour. The anchoress is to understand that, in a way, less is more, and that the paradox liter38  See Barratt, “Anchoritic Aspects,” 34ff.

39  AW, 2.477–78 at 32; Guide, 32. For brief discussion, see also McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 175. In a letter to the recluse Athalisa in praise of virginity, the twelfth-century bishop Hildebert of Lavardin similarly references the heavenly song that she will sing on account of her virtue; see Epistolæ Hildeberti, book 1, letter 21, ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 171 (Paris: Migne, 1854), col. 195B–D. 40  Engh, Gendered Identities, 309–10.



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ally and materially embodied by Mary was to guide her own behavior: just as the humble are exalted, so too can the silent exercise genuine spiritual power. This reorientation, which defines “strengðe” as extending from brief rather than abundant speech and from the imitation of Mary rather than Eve, further secures the anchoress against the sexual dangers that extended from her attempts to become a “meistre” and thus to outmatch her priest through the demonstration of her own spiritual and intellectual endowments. The imitation of her confessor, rather than Mary, leads to a false or deceptive love (“falsinde luue”),41 and not simply conflict, between priest and penitent. Beyond reaffirming her sexual purity and silence, moreover, the anchoress’s imitatio Mariae assists her in avoiding this deceptive love and brings about what the anchoress would herself desire—namely, a capacity to assist in the salvation of others. Thus, the Ancrene-author’s use of Bernard was in many ways a brilliant stroke since the Marian model of efficacious speech redirected attention away from alternative attractions, including illicit love and spiritual mastery over others. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of mastery that offered the anchoress not genuine power, but the fiction of power, not genuine “strengðe” but a false performance that ultimately endangered the anchoress herself. More specifically, the author’s use of Bernard forms part of a larger effort to undermine the association of speech with spiritual power, and thus to displace the idea (clearly held by many anchoresses) that an abundance of one correlated with an abundance of the other. Anchoresses also had little reason to assume that a commitment to bodily chastity in any way disharmonized with their work of instructing visitors, whether clerical or lay, especially since that desire was consistent with their general hope for the salvation of their fellow Christians. At issue in the author’s borrowings from Bernard, however, are the anchoress’s daily and material interactions with priests and scriptural texts, specifically in the context of confession. Alexandra Barratt notes the irony that “a treatise written for a more than ordinarily silent, and abstemious, audience should be so preoccupied with, and owe so much to, this concept of the potential and manifold abuses of the mouth.”42 However, Ancrene Wisse makes abundantly clear that many anchoresses were far from “ordinarily silent.” Such extensive reminders as we see in this text were responses to a vibrantly oral culture that, despite the author’s wishes to the contrary, centred on the anchorhold.

Conclusion

For the Ancrene-author, Mary’s vocal agency had implications that extended beyond its status as a model of exemplary conduct for anchoresses within their textual communities to shape their identities and interactions with spiritual clients.43 While 41  AW, 2.379 at 30; Guide, 30.

42  Barratt, “The Five Wits,” 22.

43  Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 88ff. On anchoritic

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each of the occasions on which the saint spoke permitted the author to assimilate Bernard’s sermon to a vision of the efficacious power of her speech, I have also argued that the Annunciation in particular became an extraordinarily versatile and rich image for reorienting readers’ notions of power. By the thirteenth century, the Annunciation had emerged as an established feature of anchoritic textual culture; late medieval representations of the Virgin as a reader at the Annunciation, together with the scene’s images of enclosure, solitude, and angelic visitation, lend further support to encouragements that anchoresses can confidently discard the image of Eve and embrace that of Mary. Moreover, at work in the text’s masterful use of scriptural representations of Mary is what John Alford has called the formation of a “scriptural self.”44 Such a designation is especially appropriate in the case of anchorites’ access to scriptural texts, whether or not these were mediated through regulatory writing. In this context, the image of Mary as reader and conduit of spiritual power becomes a model for the anchoress’s construction of such a scriptural self.45 However, that image also links the authoritative voice as an expression of embodied experience with the physical reality of everyday life. With few words, Mary helped to bring about the transformation of water into wine: in the same way, by carefully moderating her own speech, the anchoress could perhaps bring about significant changes to her own material world. Ancrene Wisse’s insistence that the anchoress’s words could be so mighty precisely by being so few was also intellectually challenging, since it rested on an insight that was in fact strongly counterintuitive: despite all appearances, silence was not to be confused with the absence of agency or of her capacity for spiritual influence, but was to be associated with power. That the speaking of few words and wrapping them in silence might in fact be a form of power was not an assumption to which counselling, confessing, and teaching anchoresses were necessarily open. In this way, the text distinguishes between two separate forms of spiritual power— one genuine and the other a fiction. Thus, for many anchoresses, the suggestion that silence was a means of accessing genuine spiritual power and that breaking one’s silence was to lose spiritual power, if it was intelligible at all, likely carried a paradoxical resonance. By associating sexual purity, silence, and the capacity to rescue others from sin, the author’s intention is to wholly undermine not so much her desire for spiritual power—that is legitimized—but the misconception that such power could only extend from her verbal dexterity. It is here that we also come once again to see textual communities in particular, see Catherine Innes-Parker, “Anchoritic Textual Communities and the Wooing Group Prayers,” in Medieval Anchorites in their Communities, 167–82.

44  J. A. Alford, “The Scriptural Self,” in The Bible in the Middle Ages: Its Influence on Literature and Art, ed. Bernard S. Levy, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 89 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992), 1–21 at 13ff.

45  On the question of anchoritic literacy, see Bella Millett’s excellent discussion in “Women in No Man’s Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 86–103.



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the anchorhold “as a contested space, poised between the two realms of the sacred and the secular.”46 In this way, the Ancrene-author reorients the anchoress’s understanding of precisely wherein her spiritual power consists—the relation between salvation, moral reform (through teaching), and her sexuality. In one image, the text addresses sexual danger, the desire for vocal agency, her desire for the salvation of others, her desire for spiritual power, and her desire to teach others. For in truth, the anchoress could not more quickly disempower herself than by speaking overmuch; she was every bit as vulnerable as others were to those dynamics of accusation and chastisement that depended on gossip, rumour, and suspicion.

46  Bob Hasenfratz, “The Anchorhold as Symbolic Space in Ancrene Wisse,” Philological Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2005): 1–26 at 19.

Joshua S. Easterling teaches early English literature at Murray State University in Kentucky. He writes on religious writings in late medieval England, with emphasis on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts composed by and for hermits and anchorites. His research often centres on how mystical experience, writings, and culture became sites of ideological tension, and he is currently completing a book—forthcoming with Oxford University Press (2021)—on anchoritic texts, religious reform, and spiritual charisma.

THE ANCHORITIC BODY AT PRAYER IN GOSCELIN OF SAINT-BERTIN’S LIBER CONFORTATORIUS ALICIA SMITH

When we speak

about the anchoritic body, what do we envision that body doing? In discussing the phenomenon of reclusive embodiment in its material context, we must remember that the primary activity of the recluse was prayer. This practical and ideological centrality should affect how we read texts for and about anchorites, and how we understand the vocation as it was conceptualized and practiced. This essay considers the Liber confortatorius (Book of Consolation, ca. 1080–82), the late eleventh-century Anglo-Latin epistolary treatise on the anchoritic life by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (ca. 1035–ca. 1107), found in London, British Library MS Sloane 3103. Using the concept of “liturgy” elaborated by JeanYves Lacoste, I argue that this text envisions the anchoritic body at prayer through a series of images and imaginative exercises, offering its projected reader multiple ways to understand and perform her prayer life as an embodied spiritual practice, and indicating for modern scholars the multidimensionality of anchoritic prayer as a lived somatic experience. For the medieval orant, the spiritual and the material were integrated in the bodily practice of prayer; neither aspect can be separated from the whole. This is particularly true for the anchorite, whose life was specially dedicated to prayer, her existence in space and time conditioned for this purpose. The particular character of her embodiment was thus intimately linked with her prayer practice. Our access to this prayerful embodiment is admittedly mediated to a great extent through its ideological construction in instructional literature, particularly in the case of the projected recipient of the Book of Consolation. However, this is not so much a limitation as a necessary reminder that the medieval religious body was construed not only through everyday physical experience but through its spiritual dimensions, powerfully conveyed through scriptural exposition, metaphor, and the imagination. Essential primary evidence for anchoritic embodiment, including prayer practice, can be derived from archaeological and other attention to its material traces (as, for example, Victoria Yuskaitis’s note in this volume demonstrates by highlighting the distinctive proximity of the anchorite’s squint at Ruyton to the piscina, and thus to the physical actions of the Mass1). But whether or not they include details of the specificities of anchoritic life, instructional texts also offer insight into how the reclusive body was understood and experienced: ideological construal is inseparable from physical experience, particularly in the case of the integrated embodied practice of prayer. Attention to these texts’ 1  Victoria Yuskaitis, “Considering the Archaeological Context of an Anchoritic Cell at Ruyton, Shropshire,” Early Middle English, 3, no. 1 (2021), 131–36.

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modelling of prayer is thus a key vantage point into the material conditions of the enclosed person. Goscelin’s Book of Consolation, written around 1080, is framed in part as a guidance text for the new anchoritic vocation of his erstwhile protégée Eve (ca. 1058– ca. 1125), formerly a nun at the abbey of Wilton.2 Goscelin, a Flemish Benedictine, came to England before the Conquest with the bishop Hermann of Wiltshire (d. 1078); Eve appears to have been given as a child oblate to Wilton around 1065, and by Goscelin’s account was his pupil there. The Book of Consolation was probably composed shortly after Eve’s sudden departure from Wilton to be enclosed at Angers, without the absent Goscelin’s knowledge. The text has a complex generic identity, in which instruction and Boethian consolatory rhetoric jostle uneasily with lament, reproach, and reminiscence.3 Goscelin paints a vivid picture of the close spiritual friendship he enjoyed with Eve as her teacher, now irreparably broken by her abrupt departure. While the Book of Consolation may cast itself as a tool for Eve’s new life, Goscelin is often more concerned with making sense of their ruptured relationship than with detailing specific practices; this extends to prayer, on which the text gives little advice in comparison to later anchoritic guides. Goscelin provides nothing like the detailed pattern of liturgical and extraliturgical prayer recommended in the thirteenth-century manual Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) or the extended model meditations in Ælred of Rievaulx’s twelfth-century treatise De institutione inclusarum (Rule for a Recluse, ca. 1160–62; Ælred, 1110/12–1167).4 But given Eve’s prior liturgical training at Wilton, Goscelin presumably felt no need to prescribe a routine she knew well. The absence of specific discussion, far from indicating lack of concern for the external rule, conveys its centrality: it simply goes without saying. When the Book of Consolation does discuss prayer, it is often in theoretical or theological terms rather than practical ones. This statement in Book Three is typical: Verum oratio sit ante omnia […] quecunque feceris, in nomine eius fiant omnia, Dominoque consecrentur omnia, hoc est orare omni hora. In truth, prayer should come before all else […] whatever you do, do it all in his name, and dedicate everything to the Lord. That is what it means to pray at all times.5

2  For their biographies, see André Wilmart, “Eve et Goscelin,” Révue Bénédictine 46 (1934): 414–38 and 50 (1938): 42–83; and Therese Latzke, “Robert von Arbrissel, Ermengard und Eva,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 19 (1984): 116–54.

3  Rebecca Hayward discusses the text’s generic complexities in “Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius: Complaints and Consolations,” in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis with W. R. Barnes, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar, and Michael Wright, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004): 355–68.

4  However, see Monika Otter, “Entrances and Exits: Performing the Psalms in Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius,” Speculum 83, no. 2 (2008): 283–302, for discussion of his uses of the Psalms.

5  Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, ed. C. H. Talbot, Analecta monastica 3 / Studia Anselmiana 37 (1955): 1–117 at 80, hereafter Liber; and The Book of

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Goscelin rhetorically collapses prayer into the dedication of all one does to God. This establishes an assumption that regular prayer practice is the recluse’s main task, but goes further, portraying prayer as a continual, embodied state, as well as activity, of the enclosed person. It is not exclusively located in specific forms of speech or even the mind or intention: it is an ongoing state of the holy person, paradigmatically the enclosed anchorite. In my theorization of prayer as a state or orientation, I draw on the work of the philosophical theologian Jean-Yves Lacoste in Experience and the Absolute (Expérience et absolu). Lacoste’s concept of “liturgy” offers a useful model for the way in which anchoritic enclosure renders prayer a way of life: it is defined as “the resolute deliberate gesture made by those who ordain their being-in-the-world a being-before-God, and who do violence to the former in the name of the latter.”6 Modifying the essentially atheistic closedness of the Heideggerian concept of Dasein, being-in-the-world, Lacoste models liturgy—not simply forms and orders, but more inclusively “the logic that presides over the encounter between God and man writ large”—as an embodied “gesture” affirming human contingency on God, beingbefore-God as central to our nature.7 Enclosure is a “liturgical work” which performs this contingency physically, “in the most rigorous way possible.”8 It devotes the practitioner entirely to encounter with God through the minimization of ordinary spatial relations. Prayer thus emerges (especially for the recluse) not only from the mind or spirit, but also from the body, and more specifically the body in its space and material context. But prayer also cuts across the person’s historical emplacement, their being-in-the-world, through encounter with the eternal God and the resulting proleptic knowledge of the body’s own eventual transformation into an eternal being. For Goscelin, the promise of the eschaton is the telos of everything he has been and done, and everything that Eve has been and done, grounding his hope of perfect union with her in the life to come.9 He instructs her to strive after the new creation “indefesso labore, incessabili prece” (with untiring labor, with incessant prayer), looking ahead to the renewal of her body: “ut, iugibus fontibus lota lacrimarum, mox ut hanc tunicam corpoream posueris felicius receptura” (wash your bodily Encouragement and Consolation, trans. Monika Otter (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 94, hereafter Book.

6  Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 39. Originally published as Expérience et absolu: Questions disputées sur l’humanité de l’homme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994). 7  Lacoste, Experience, 2.

8  Lacoste, Experience, 27.

9  Diane Watt analyses the text’s apocalyptic dimension as part of its consolatory purpose in a rich comparison with Pearl (“Small Consolation? Goscelin of St. Bertin’s Liber confortatorius and the Middle English Pearl,” The Chaucer Review, 51, no. 1 (2016): 31–48); however, her conclusion that “Goscelin seems to recognize at last that even in heaven reconciliation with Eve may not be possible” (47) seems to me to underemphasize the overarching hope which the eschaton represents for Goscelin, personally and theologically.

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dress with the twin sources of your tears, so that as soon as you lay it down you may receive back more blessedly).10 The eschaton is the larger pattern which Eve’s enclosure and everyday prayer practice ultimately signify: as Rebecca Hayward notes, Goscelin encourages her “to locate herself in Christian temporal and spatial paradigms […] the time she passes in the restricted space of the cell will allow her to enter the limitless abundance, temporal and spatial, of heaven.”11 Lacoste theorizes this connection between embodied prayer and bodily transformation as the “liturgical subversion of the topological.” The anchorite’s performance of contingency on God, grounded in the practice of prayer, transforms the meaning of her embodiment through the overarching signifier of the eschaton: “liturgy suggests a redefinition of place: no longer is it to be thought of as a being-there but as beingtoward,” specifically being-toward God in his timeless unity.12 In the remainder of this essay, I explore some of the ways in which Goscelin’s Book of Consolation represents the body of the praying anchorite in her space. I demonstrate how prayer informs Goscelin’s rhetorical collapse of the time and space between him and Eve, as he draws on its alignment with eternity to fix his hope on the transformation of the praying body.

Goscelin’s Representations of the Praying Anchorite

How, then, does Goscelin lead Eve to understand herself as a praying subject? In a range of largely scriptural images, Goscelin portrays prayer as a dynamic, engaged activity, in which the praying person interacts bodily with the space surrounding her and with God. As Liz Herbert McAvoy has argued, “sacred anchoritic space is created and maintained by those practices enacted within it”: prayer, as the means by which Eve dedicates her whole life to the Lord, conditions how the material circumstances of her cell are used and understood.13 The cell, in turn, becomes a crucial figure in the text’s spiritual topography, morphing from ark to prison to nest, the body within at once confined and in control. One instance of this spatially determined model of prayer is the strain of imagery, characteristic of anchoritic literature, portraying the anchorite as a bird and the cell as a nest or dovecote-like space. Contrasting his utter disorientation at her loss with her newfound security, Goscelin says of Eve, “Tu nidificasti in petra, ego arenis illidor” (You have built your nest in a rock, I slide about in the sand).14 He plain10  Liber, 116; Book, 150.

11  Rebecca Hayward, “Representations of the Anchoritic Life in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius,” in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed. Mari Hughes-Edwards and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 54–64 at 55. 12  Lacoste, Experience, 25.

13  Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space, and the Solitary Life (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2011), 102. 14  Liber, 34; Book, 35.

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tively reflects that he wanted her to be “cenobialis columba, non turtur solitaria” (a coenobitic pigeon, not a solitary mourning dove).15 In Book Three, the image shifts: Tua quoque portiuncula est hec […] ut arche summitas octo animarum a mundi impetu seclusa, et a mundano pelago uelut in ipsa archa reposita, ubi in oblationem Domini impingueris, ut altile in cauea non carne, sed anima, non epularum illecebra, sed lectione diuina.

Your portion is also this, your little cell […] like Noah’s ark, which sheltered eight souls from the attacks of the world. So you can rest in your ark from the high seas of the world, where you can grow big in sacrificing to God, like a fowl being fattened in a cage, but not in the flesh but in the soul, not with tempting food but with sacred readings.16

On one level, the imagery of the caged fowl casts the bird-anchorite as a passive receiver, absorbing the spiritual nourishment of “sacred reading.” But lectio divina was understood, as far back as the Rule of St. Benedict (ca. 516), to be an actively engaged, integrated process in which sacred text led the attentive reader into prayer. Moreover, the avian imagery evokes the common figure of birds’ flight as representing contemplation, as Mary Agnes Edsall has detailed in relation to Ancrene Wisse, which, she argues, uses flight to model the anchorite’s “minute attention to the movements of the flesh and spirit.”17 Goscelin’s metaphor of the cell as Noah’s ark embeds a similarly active dimension, implicitly evoking the dove sent out to determine whether the flood had receded. The sheltering meaning of the ark image thus coexists with an idea that the bird-anchorite can fly out from it and return: a move reminiscent of Ancrene Wisse’s description of the anchoress as nicticorax (night-bird), said to “fleon […] bi niht toward heouene” (fly by night towards heaven) from her nest-anchorhold.18 Indeed, Goscelin uses the same verse in his lyrical prologue: “Eua ea est Christi pupilla, Deo soli relicta solitaria in tecto, nicticorax in domicilio facta” (The Eve of whom I speak is Christ’s darling, left alone in the house for God’s sake; she is become the night raven in the house).19 Eve is a bird enclosed, nested in a safe place. Her oblationem Domini, her sacrifice to God through the integrated practice of lectio divina, is the purpose and outcome of that security. Prayer implicitly enables her body, defined and disciplined within an enclosed space, to range outwards from that space, or perhaps expand it. 15  Liber, 36; Book, 36. 16  Liber, 72; Book, 84.

17  Mary Agnes Edsall, “‘True Anchoresses Are Called Birds’: Asceticism as Ascent and the Purgative Mysticism of the Ancrene Wisse,” Viator 34 (2003): 157–86 at 164.

18  Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.340–41 at vol. 1, p. 56 (hereafter AW). Translations from Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), here 56 (hereafter Guide). 19  Liber, 26; Book, 19.

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A recurrent thread of martial metaphor further develops an active depiction of prayer practice, from an instruction to “armare fide inuicta” (arm yourself with invincible faith) for intercessory prayer, to an exhortation to defensive vigilance: “uigilandum [est] in armis orationum et munimentis custodiarum” (keep watch in the armour of prayer on the ramparts of your confinement).20 Prayerful vigil equips Eve to be the watcher on the walls of her own enclosure, combining the figurative sense of spiritual armour, drawn from Ephesians 6:10–18, with the physical realities of the cell. Imagery which is not quite martial, but nonetheless uses violence as a metaphor, also appears, incorporating the language of enclosures, doors, and separations which permeates the text. For example, Goscelin recounts the advice he gave Eve on her profession as a nun: Clama, eiula, pulsa, ut aperiatur tibi. Luctare cum Domino donec superes: uim fac regno celorum ut intres. Shout, wail, knock, so that the door may be opened to you. Struggle with the Lord as long as you have life; push violently to enter the kingdom of heaven.21

Christ’s injunction to ask, seek, and knock is woven together with an allusion to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel of God.22 This idea of struggling with God for a blessing—here, the crossing of the threshold into the kingdom—also drives one of the most intensely envisioned examples of prayerful engagement with God in Ancrene Wisse: Efter þe measse cos, hwen þe preost sacreð—þer forȝeoteð al þe world, þer beoð al ut of bodi, þer i sperclinde luue bicluppeð ower leofmon, þe into ower breostes bur is iliht of heouene, ant haldeð him heteueste aþet he habbe iȝettet ow al þet ȝe eauer easkið.23

After the kiss of peace in the Mass, when the priest is taking communion—there forget all the world, there be quite out of the body, there in burning love embrace your lover, who has descended from heaven into the chamber of your breast, and hold him tightly until he has granted you everything that you ask.24

The anchorite is to hold Christ tightly until he grants “all that you ask,” an echo of Jacob’s words to the angel: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me.”25 In Ancrene Wisse, the release is from loving embrace rather than a struggle, though embrace also informs Goscelin’s understanding of prayerful encounter with God: “amplectere tota affectuose mentis puritate” (embrace him with the whole affectionate purity of your mind).26 20  Liber, 33 and 51; Book, 32 and 55. 21  Liber, 28; Book, 24.

22  See Matthew 7:7; Luke 11:9; Genesis 32. 23  AW, 1.241–44 at 13. 24  Guide, 13.

25  Genesis 32:36. Quotations from the Bible follow the Douai-Rheims Version. 26  Liber, 108; Book, 137.

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In both modes, prayer is imagined as close physical contact, reflecting in heightened rhetoric its practical realities as an embodied practice.27 Prayer necessitates the engagement of the whole body, marking out the walls and thresholds of inner space by integrating the physical and spatial dimensions of the person with the spiritual. In Ancrene Wisse this is paradoxically done while “al ut of bodi,” but this phrase is an outlier in that text’s highly embodied model of prayer.28 In the Book of Consolation, Goscelin recalls his evocation of the bridal chamber of Canticles in his advice to the young Eve, the terms he used then gaining a new resonance in light of her enclosure: “Ut solum accipias, sola huc intrasti” (You entered here alone to receive him alone).29 Her entrance into an eroticized enclosure becomes an arena of spiritual action through the determined struggle of prayer. She pushes through a deeper threshold, into the kingdom of heaven.

Meditation: Shaping Eve’s Time around Scriptural Narrative

Embodiment, however, is not only a spatial but a temporal quality. Lacoste describes liturgical experience as what occurs “when we accept that our time is the kairos of the encounter with God, and no longer the chronos that is the measure of our presence in the world.”30 Goscelin in the Book of Consolation continually asserts Eve’s separation from ordinary chronos, and models and theorizes how prayer—both hers, and his for her—functions through disruption of linear time, grounded in the hope of the eschaton and its transformation of the human body. Some of the more usable instructional material on prayer in the Book of Consolation constitutes an early example of the kind of synchronization of daily prayers to scriptural narrative which was increasingly practised in monastic contexts over the high medieval period, and in the context of the anchorhold became “a relentless process of remembrance,” in A. S. Lazikani’s phrase.31 Similarly to the instruction in Ancrene Wisse to recite the Penitential and Gradual Psalms at mid-morning, “for abute swuch time […] ure Lauerd þolede pine upo þe rode” (because at about that time […] our Lord suffered torture on the cross),32 Goscelin assigns appropriate foci for Eve’s prayers to the successive hours of the day:

27  At the 2018 International Anchoritic Society conference panel where the first version of this paper was presented, we discussed the idea that the Ancrene Wisse prayer routine could provide a kind of “anchoritic calisthenics,” a habitual exercise regime which helped maintain the practitioner’s physical condition in the otherwise less than healthy conditions of an anchoritic cell. This dimension should not be seen as separate from the routine’s central spiritual purposes, but fully integrated. 28  AW, 1.242 at 13.

29  Liber, 28; Book, 24.

30  Lacoste, Experience, 36.

31  A. S. Lazikani, “Remembrance and Time in the Wooing Group” in Reconsidering Gender, Time, and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Roberta Magnani (Cambridge: Brewer, 2015): 79–94 at 79; see André Wilmart, “Prières médiévales pour l’adoration de la croix,” Ephemerides liturgicae 46 (1932): 22–65 for an overview of the development of this approach to prayer. 32  AW, 1.131–32 at 10; Guide, 10.

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Media nocte adora captum et carceratum […] hora tertia cruci addictum […] Hora sexta cruci appensum, hora nona mortuum, uespere sepultum. Item a gallicinio, oriente lucifero, matutina laudatione saluta resurrectionem Domini.

In the middle of the night adore him captured and incarcerated […] in the third hour as he is handed over to be crucified […] In the sixth hour [venerate him] as he is being nailed to the cross, in the ninth hour [venerate him] dead, in the evening as he is being buried. Then, at cock’s crow, when the morning star rises, greet the Lord’s resurrection with a morning prayer of praise.33

The list is prefaced by the instruction to “omnes horas Christi passionibus consecra” ([s]anctify all hours with Christ’s suffering), but the subjects for meditation go beyond the Passion to include Christ’s ministry, resurrection, and ascension.34 Eve can sanctify her time with Christ’s Passion even when considering points in salvation history which come before and after: this central point structures and absorbs all other times and their meanings. This structuring function also pertains to the orant’s own time. Using her enclosed, ascetically suffering body to pray her way into affective convergence with the suffering Christ, the anchorite performs the subordination of ordinary temporal separations, in favour of encounter with sacred history.35 The vivid reality of the time of the Passion, immediate to the orant through grace, “makes our present tremble,” in Lacoste’s terms. That is, it subordinates present experience to something more real, the paradigmatic point of intersection with eternity, and thus “enables us to effectively infringe on the laws governing worldly temporalization.”36 The Passion consecrates Eve’s experience of time by disrupting its linearity: the grammatically suspended participles (“captum et carceratum […] addictum […] appensum […] mortuum”) suggest that these events are not past but present to the meditating Eve, accessible through devotion.37 Chronologically separate times touch once more as, at dawn, Eve is to “greet” the resurrection. The verb salutare evokes its use in Paul’s letter to the Hebrews to describe the proleptic heralding of the Messiah by the people of faith listed: “All these died according to faith, not having received the promises, but beholding them afar off, and saluting [salutantes] them” (Hebrews 11:13). Eve’s perspective is super33  Liber, 83; Book, 99. 34  Liber, 83; Book, 99.

35  The scholarship on sacred time in the Middle Ages is extensive: Aron Gurevich, “What is Time?” in Categories of Medieval Culture [Kategorii srednevekovoi kultury, 1972], trans. G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge, 1985), provides a useful overview and explains how liturgy (which we may here define in Lacoste’s sense) discloses the multidimensionality of medieval time: “the absolute past—the sacral moments of biblical history—does not recede, and can be recapitulated in the liturgy; the absolute future […] is not brought nearer by the flow of time, for the kingdom of God can break into the present at any moment” (145–46). 36  Lacoste, Experience, 85.

37  Lazikani analyses how the same effect is created in the early Middle English “Lofsong of ure Lefdi,” in which the meditating anchoress “is implicated in the ever-moving cycle; she is always suffering with Christ, entering the depths of each image” (“Remembrance,” 90).

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ficially opposite, looking back to the events of the Gospels, but the choice of verb aligns her with these saints yearning for the fulfilment of the promise of bodily resurrection—a future event, but one which pertains to every moment of chronological time equally, making it possible to move between them laterally through devotion. Eve’s “greeting” through meditative prayer practice is then paralleled with an Annunciation scene in which, as in many medieval representations, the Virgin is anachronistically practicing contemporary liturgy: Paritura media nocte sancta assuetudine ad diuinos hymnos surgeret, et Canticum graduum inter surgendum timpanizaret, ad hunc uersum ubi dixit: Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum, ingressum fuisse Gabrielem archangelum cum celesti splendore, adeo ut uirgo uideretur hunc tali salutatione excipere.

[The Virgin] once rose in the middle of the night, as was her sacred custom, to sing divine hymns. As she rose she intoned the gradual psalm; and when she arrived at the verse where it says, ‘May the Lord watch over your comings in and goings out’— at that very moment the Archangel Gabriel entered with heavenly splendour, so that the Virgin appeared to be receiving him with this greeting.38

By praying the psalm, Mary brings it into a new temporal dimension and a new meaning. The moment of annunciation becomes a demonstration of the unity of disparate times in the central point of the Incarnation, accessible through prayer. Moreover, Mary is clearly aligned with the solitary vocation, alone in media nocte (the middle of the night), a time closely associated with reclusive prayer. The setting thus conveys a special capacity of anchoritic solitude to foster such moments of temporal unity, where individual points in chronological time chime together in token of their connection to eternal reality.

Intercession: Sighs and Tears as Prayer

The temporal context which most exercises Goscelin, however, is his own, and Eve’s: their past happiness, now gone forever, and his present which is full of grief. One symptom of this grief is his desire to remain connected to Eve through intercession – most often, hers for him. Envisioning Eve as almost Marian in her newfound vocation, Goscelin attributes to her the power to restore him, and implores her to do so on account of the love they once shared. He portrays himself as abjectly reliant on her intercession: “Nos autem refoue precibus […] imploro te, o domina mea […] meos luctus cum tuis lacrimis offer altissime benignitati” (warm me with your prayers […] I beg you, my lady […] offer up my mourning along with your tears to the goodness of the Most High).39 Like the Desert Fathers who in prayer became “as it were one flame,” Eve can revive Goscelin with the heat of her devotion.40 Like a priest, she can offer up their shared pain as a sacrifice to God. 38  Liber, 83; Book, 100–101.

39  Liber, 33; Book, 31.

40  Helen Waddell, ed. and trans., The Desert Fathers (New York: Vintage, 1998), 129.

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Mourning and tears (the homophonous luctus and lacrimis) become themselves Eve’s offering of prayer. Tears and devout prayer are associated throughout Christian history, arising ultimately from scriptural precedents such as the weeping of Hannah (1 Samuel 1:10) and various Psalmic speakers (Psalm 6:8, 39:12 inter alia). Tears express penitence, but also more broadly the strength of the orant’s devotion, and are often assigned a prayerful efficacy in themselves (more or less literally). As foundational an authority as Augustine (354–430) writes that prayer is often accomplished “more with sighs [gemitibus] than words, more with weeping [fletu] than with speaking.”41 Significantly, Eve is envisioned as praying with both her own tears and Goscelin’s mourning. He projects his own grief onto the ascetic suffering of the anchoritic vocation and claims a part in her prayers through this union, not only as the object of Eve’s intercession, but as an intimately involved co-orant. These blurred boundaries between weeping and prayer are not only indicative of the affective dimension of the latter: the elision works to collapse the distance between them, both geographical, between England and France, and temporal, between now and happier times. Goscelin’s desire for closeness through prayer animates his maudlin self-description in Book One: Quod uero ego non mereor conuersationis indignitate, tu obtineas dilectionis ac precum benignitate […] Si quando autem reuersa ad te cogitatio ita interrogauerit, ‘ille quondam carus quid nunc facit?’, hec semper pagina hoc uno uerbo actiuo pro passiuo respondebit: Suspirat. Ubicumque illum queres, hic inuenies, hic tecum susurrantem uel uidebis uel audies.

What my unworthy conduct does not deserve, may it be granted through the goodness of your love and your prayers […] whenever you should chance to think of me and wonder, perhaps, ‘he was once dear to me—what may he be doing now?’ this page will always answer, with one verb, active rather than passive, ‘he is sighing.’ Wherever you may seek him, you will find him here; you will see and hear him with you, whispering to you.42

The intensity of Goscelin’s grief and love mirrors the intercessory power resulting from Eve’s ascetic abnegation of the world. Sighs and tears of devotion blend into the sighs he depicts his book as communicating directly to Eve, his mourning and her tears counting as one prayer. Affective prayer is consciously aligned with the pain of the broken relationship in order to bolster the most important theme of the work: Goscelin’s repeated assertion that “[n]ulla ergo regionum interiectione separatur ab amico, qui in omnipotente et omnia representante confidit Domino” (they cannot be separated from a friend, no matter how great the physical distance, who trust in the Lord’s power that makes all things ever present).43 Grief inscribes Goscelin’s self onto the page he sends to Eve, making him present with her. As many have noted, it is difficult to know how to read this rhetorical move when we have no corroborating information about the nature of their past relation-

41  Roland J. Teske, trans., Letters, vol. 2, The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. Boniface Ramsey, vol. 16 (Hyde Park: New City, 2003), Letter 130, 93. 42  Liber, 45; Book, 48. 43  Liber, 45; Book, 47.

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ship.44 The idea of Goscelin being present in the cell, “whispering” to Eve, has been read as highly invasive.45 Without excluding that aspect, I suggest that attention should be paid to the temporal dimension of this passage, in which Goscelin exhorts Eve to endure “tam breui excursu mortalitatis” (this brief mortal interlude).46 The past is affirmed as past—“ille quondam carus” (he was once dear to me); “aliquando presumebam” (there was a time when I presumed to think)47—but its continuing effects in the present are vividly communicated: “suspirat” (he is sighing). Eve’s role as intercessor is constructed in relation to Goscelin’s desire, not only to be warmed by her prayers but to somehow be joined to her in prayer, despite all their separations. His sighs are as much a prayer as a psalm would be: they impinge on the space of Eve’s cell, as close as the words on the page. The book, and the tears which it communicates, become a material connection, a token of Goscelin’s yearning and an attempt to embody the past in the present—even in the uncertain future moment of Eve’s reception of the text, for which we have no definite proof. Ultimately, however, Goscelin attempts to lead Eve through and beyond these dimensions of time, and the body in time, into their sublimation in eternity. Prayer is the foretaste of heavenly communion, in which they will not leave the bodies in which they knew one another behind, but instead see them transformed.

Eternity: Unity on the Paschal Day

The Book of Consolation concludes with an extended description of the day of Judgment and the transfiguration of the redeemed in the new heavens and new earth. One of the great themes of Goscelin’s eschatological vision is unification, 44  H. M. Canatella has argued for its recognition purely as spiritual friendship (“Long-Distance Love: The Ideology of Male-Female Spiritual Friendship in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 1 (2010): 35–53); a version of a talk given by Mark Williams in 2000 at the Hill Monastic Library takes a similar position (“Monastery Love or Just a Friendship? Reading the Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of St-Bertin,” accessed January 9, 2021, https://www.academia.edu/10035308/Monastery_Love_or_Just_a_Friendship_Reading_ the_Liber_Confortatorius_of_Goscelin_of_St._Bertin).

45  See, for example, Kathryn Maude, “Behealde ge wif: Addressing Women in Medieval Religious Texts, 960–1160” (Ph.D. diss., King’s College London, 2016): “Goscelin’s authorial voice is a manipulative one, addressing Eve without her consent” (135)—a reading developed in “‘She Fled from the Uproar of the World’: Eve of Wilton and the Rhetorics of Solitude,” Magistra 21, no. 1 (2015): 36–50. Diane Watt pointedly calls for the recognition that “time’s up for Goscelin of St Bertin” (“Witness for the Prosecution? MS Sloane 3103 Takes the Stand,” University of Surrey, accessed January 9, 2021, https://blogs.surrey.ac.uk/early-medieval-women/2018/08/06/ witness-for-the-prosecution-ms-sloane-3103-takes-the-stand/), although in a more extended analysis of the Liber, she concludes that Goscelin is able to let go of Eve by the end of the book, through a combination of eschatological hope and the recognition that her true spiritual mother is St. Edith (Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020], 157–58). 46  Liber, 45; Book, 47.

47  Liber, 45; Book, 48.

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emerging from the doctrine of bodily resurrection, which teaches that every part of every human body, “quodque etiam a fine usque ad finem orbis terre distabat in puncto coibit, nec uel capillus uel ungula abscissa cuiquam peribit” (whatever was distant from one end of the earth to the other, will instantly coalesce in one point; and not a hair or clipped fingernail will perish).48 The body parts named here recall the description by Abbo of Fleury (ca. 945–1004), quoted by Sophie Sawicka-Sykes in her essay in this volume and surely known to Goscelin, of the recluse Oswen tending St. Edmund’s incorrupt body, cutting his miraculously growing hair and nails and keeping them as secondary relics.49 Saintly bodies and body parts, manifesting the miraculous in the material, prefigure in their incorruptibility the ultimate transformation of every body—indeed, of all physical matter—on that last day. Goscelin’s description of the transfigured world explodes the text’s characteristic spatiality of enclosure, thresholds, walls, and absences: Singula singulorum, et omnia erunt omnium […] ubique aderunt omnia […] Clara omnibus erunt omnium cogitationes et corda. Tunc quisque loquetur secreta, atque Deus reserabit pectora luci.

Anything will belong to anyone and everything to everyone […] Everyone will be everywhere […] Everyone’s thoughts and everyone’s hearts will be clearly visible to all. Everyone will openly speak his innermost thoughts, and the Lord will unlock all breasts and open them to his light.50

This transformation is essentially one of space and place: it is significant that one detail of the vision is that Eve’s cell will be “iam non cellam sed insignem regiam” (no longer a cell but a splendid palace).51 On reclusion as a liturgical work which transforms the practitioner’s relationship to place, Lacoste asserts: In impoverishing his relation to place to the limit, and by subverting the meaning of his location, the ascetic does not deny the existence of place […] he affirms the right and freedom to transfigure (albeit precariously) the logic of being-in-the-world in the name of a liturgical logic, and desires the eschatological establishment of this transfiguration.52

The essential paradox of Christian asceticism, that true freedom emerges from a matrix of discipline and restraint, is embraced bodily and spatially by the recluse. The transformation thus achieved, loosening the embodied person from inherence in the world to be open to encounter with the transcendent, is “established” in the eschaton—it relies for its validity on the relativization of time engendered by time’s teleological relationship to eternity. Eve’s physical enclosure, the dramatic minimization of her material existence, acts as sign and seal of the final redemption of her body. 48  Liber, 109; Book, 139.

49  Sophie Sawicka-Sykes, “Relics and the Recluse’s Touch in Goscelin’s Miracles of St. Edmund,” Early Middle English 3, no. 1 (2021): 71–85 at 82. 50  Liber, 115–16; Book, 148–49.

51  Liber, 114; Book, 148.

52  Lacoste, Experience, 28.

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Goscelin’s vision of Eve’s life and afterlife, and indeed of his own, is animated by this underlying dynamic of bodily transformation, set within an Augustinian figure of time transcended: Tunc erunt celi noui et terra noua, non alia quidem elementa, sed in aliam gloriam mutata, sicut humana corpora nostra alterius felicitatis erunt, non alia […] Nunc septem diebus omne seculum uoluitur; in illa infinita dies erit octaua […] tam perfectum quam nunquam transitorium pascha.

There will be new heavens and a new earth—not of other elements but the same ones transformed into another glory, just as our human bodies will be wholly other in a new blessedness but still the same bodies […] Now earthly time goes in a sevenday cycle; then, there will be one endless eighth day […] a perfect and never-ending paschal day of the Lord.53

“Ad huius itaque letitie uisionem,” Goscelin urges Eve, “summa humilitate, inextinguibili caritate, indefesso labore, incessabili prece suspira, anhela, tende” (To see this joy, sigh, pant, strive with great humility, with inextinguishable love, with untiring labour, with incessant prayer).54 He can reconcile himself to Eve’s loss because the separation of her anchoritic vocation paradoxically unites them more fully and finally, in mutual intercessory prayer. The eschatological future both underwrites the efficacy of this prayer and fulfils it. Their bodies, now separated and suffering, will be unified and glorified, sighing prayer transformed into singing praise: Omnis armonia corporum splendoribus et radiis celestibus erit plena […] ut clamemus in exultatione perpetua: Benedic anima mea Dominum, et omnia interiora mea nomen sanctum eius.

All the harmonious bodies will be full of splendour and celestial rays […] so that we may cry out in perpetual exultation: ‘Bless the Lord, o my soul, and let all that is in me bless his holy name.’55

Conclusion The anchoritic body, and its material contexts, are inseparable from this teleology of time wrapped up in eternity, of the physical not abandoned but transfigured. In the Book of Consolation as well as other anchoritic texts, the dedication of the reclusive life to prayer is understood to uniquely prepare its practitioners to anticipate the eschaton—eternity’s incursion into human time. The future transformation of the body, the end of penance, is prefigured and achieved by the life of prayer.56 53  Liber, 112; Book, 143–44. 54  Liber, 116; Book, 159.

55  Liber, 109–10; Book, 140.

56  For more on prayer and theological thought, see Nicole Bériou, Jacques Berlioz, and Jean Longère, eds., Prier au Moyen âge: pratiques et expériences (Ve–XVe siècles); textes traduits et commentés (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991); Santha Bhattacharji, Rowan Williams, and Dominic Mattos, eds., Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Benedicta Ward SLG (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Roy Hammerling, A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

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This dimension must inflect our understanding of the historical anchoritic body, which is first and foremost a praying body, and thus a crux of material and spiritual in a uniquely performative way. The material conditions of enclosure were shaped on multiple levels by the embodied practice of prayer within them. Goscelin’s Book of Consolation speaks to this reality through its multivalent models of prayer, its passionate awareness of the eschatological end of Eve’s enclosed life, and its author’s determination to share, somehow, in the prayerful union that foreshadows that ultimate transformation.

Alicia Smith completed her DPhil at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford, in 2020. Her interests are focused on medieval religious cultures, anchoritic studies, twentiethcentury medievalism, and the intersection of theology and literature. She has previously published on the models and practices of prayer found in the Regula reclusorum, the Wooing Group, and Ancrene Wisse.

STUPOR IN JOHN OF GADDESDEN’S ROSA MEDICINAE LAURA GODFREY*

Discussing the causes of paralysis in his medical compendium Rosa medicinae (The Rose of Medicine), John of Gaddesden describes the condition stupor by citing the conflicting theories of Avicenna and Galen about the condition’s defining feature: its effect on the powers of sense and motion. While stupor is most explicitly described and used in medical texts, states of reduced or impaired bodily faculties suffuse writings of ecstatic religious experiences. In moments of spiritual ecstasy or rapture, the affected body becomes impaired in one or more faculties, manifesting often as temporary paralysis, numbness, blindness, and other sensory and motor impairments. For instance, Julian of Norwich’s (1343–after 1416) deathbed vision of Christ occurs alongside partial paralysis and increasing blindness. In these moments, the body of the religious ecstatic becomes an object, not unlike the bleeding relics of Caroline Walker Bynum’s work which “speak or act their physicality in particularly intense ways that call attention to their per se ‘stuffness’ and ‘thingness.’”1 Taking medieval medical stupor as a case study, we might understand how religious writers—whether male authors of anchoritic guides and vitae of anchoresses or anchorites themselves—used medical discourse to describe and make sense of powerful and complex somatic and cognitive experiences. In some religious and devotional texts, stupor functions to describe the paralysis or temporary numbness of the faculties of movement or sensation. The hallmark biblical narrative for this physical state is the conversion of St. Paul in Acts of the Apostles. The biblical account uses precisely this language, describing Paul as “tremens ac stupens” (trembling and astonished) after encountering God on the road to Damascus.2 This moment is described in Paul’s vita in the South English Legendary (thirteenth–fourteenth century) as astonishment, or the state of being astoned, as stupor becomes in Middle English: “he stod ase þei he a-stoned were.”3 The physi*  John of Gaddesden, Rosa anglica practica medicine a capite ad pedes noviter impressa et perquam diligentissime emendate (Venice, 1516). All translations are my own. All abbreviations have been silently expanded, and all punctuation and spelling have been regularized. I am grateful for the opportunity to consult this material in 2018 through the Ahmanson Research Fellowship for the Study of Medieval and Renaissance Books and Manuscripts. I appreciate the feedback from Joseph McAlhany, Chris Renshaw, Jessica Henderson, M. Breann Leake, and Micah James Goodrich. I am also grateful for the feedback from editors Michelle M. Sauer and Jenny C. Bledsoe as well as the anonymous reviews. 1  Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011), 29. 2  Acts 9:6 (Latin Vulgate).

3  The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints I: MS. Laud, 108 in the Bodleian Library, ed. Carl Horstmann, Early English Text Society, o.s. 57 (London: Trübner, 1887), 190, line 17.

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cal effects of this stupor or astonishment on Paul’s body include the inability to move, temporary blindness, and trembling. Indeed, anchoritic materials acknowledge the interconnectedness of spiritual experience and bodily health or illness. In the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), the author refers to the health of the soul using allusions for bodily illness, health, and medicine. For instance, Christ’s love is described as Greek fire, which can only be quenched by urine, sand, or vinegar. Urine, a diagnostic tool in medieval medicine, stands as a threat to the metaphorical balance of humours in this spiritual experience.4 By describing these intensely spiritual moments using medical discourse such as stupor, texts like these underscore the physical components of this mode of religious experience. John of Gaddesden (fl. 1305–1348) is the first English medical writer to be formally trained in medicine in England. He composed the Rosa medicinae or Rosa anglica (ca. 1313–1320) while a fellow at Merton College, Oxford. Although Gaddesden makes unique observations from his personal experience, the Rosa is a compilation of ideas about the body and medicine from major medical writers, both ancient and contemporary to Gaddesden, such as Avicenna (980–1037), Galen (129–ca. 210), Hippocrates (d. ca. 370 BCE), Averroes (1126–1198), and Bernard of Gordon (fl. 1270–1330).5 Gaddesden intended the Rosa to serve as a resource for both rich and poor physicians and surgeons, a much wider readership than other medical manuals: Et sicut rosa excellit omnes flores, ita iste liber excellit omnes practicas medicine quia erit pro pauperibus divitibus cirurgicis et medicis, de quo non opus multum recurrere ad alios libros, quia hic videlicet satis de morbis curabilibus in speciali videbitur et in generali.

And just as the rose excels above all flowers, so does this book excel above all practical books of medicine because it is intended for poor and wealthy surgeons and physicians. There is not much need to return to other books, because here one may see enough about curable diseases specifically and generally.6

Although Gaddesden sought to reach a broader audience of medical practitioners, the Rosa circulated exclusively in Latin. It was not until Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum (The Book about Judgments of Urine, ca. 1375–1382) that medical texts in Middle English began to circulate among non-specialist audiences, including religious ones. Further, it is important to highlight the work of Monica Green who, drawing from limited extant evidence, concludes that the libraries of houses of religious

4  Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 142–167 at 151–53. See also Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7.257–320 at vol. 1, pp. 151–52 (hereafter AW). 5  See Martha Carlin, “Gaddesden, John (d. 1348/9), physician,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004. 6  Gaddesden, Rosa anglica, fol. 3r.



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women in England would seldom include medical texts.7 Therefore, circulating medical discourse would more likely have impacted those men writing for or about religious women. In advising against excessive bodily mortification, for instance, the author of Ancrene Wisse reveals his medical knowledge through references to figures like Hippocrates and Galen and pharmaceutical plants such as ginger, zedoary,8 and gillyflower cloves9 in order to assert the superiority of spiritual health.10 Gaddesden’s Rosa was translated into Middle English and Irish in the fifteenth century,11 and while there are a number of manuscripts extant, the enduring impact of the Rosa is evident in its numerous Latin printed editions, the earliest of which was produced in Pavia in 1492.12 The text demonstrates that medical discourse of the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries in England continued to circulate. Among the eight internal causes of paralysis, Gaddesden focuses particularly on the eighth cause, that is “durities et grossities nervi” (the hardness and thickness of the nerve), the same cause of stupor.13 Like paralysis, the effects of stupor include “diminutio sensus et motus et maxime diminutio tactus” (the lessening of sensation and motion and especially the lessening of touch), similar to the sensation of one’s leg or arm falling asleep.14 The decrease of both faculties of motion and sensation, specifically one’s ability to perceive through touch, results in overwhelming feelings of numbness or loss of overall sensation. The author of Ancrene Wisse advises that one must closely guard the body’s external senses, most specifically touch or feeling because it is present in all external faculties and throughout the body: “Þis ilke an wit is in alle þe oþre, ant ʒont al þe licome, ant for-þi hit is neod to habben best warde” (This one sense is present in all the others, and through the whole body, and for this reason it needs to be most closely guarded).15 Stupor, then, facilitates the decrease or temporary elimination of bodily sensation so that the anchorite may focus the soul entirely on God. However, defining stupor creates terminological problems,16 and Gaddesden attempts to reconcile the two major conflicting theories of Avicenna and Galen. 7  Monica H. Green, “Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages,” Dynamis 20 (2000): 331–69 at 344–45. 8  An Indian plant related to turmeric.

9  Gillyflower refers to a number of scented flowering plants, especially carnations or clove pinks. 10  See AW, 6.322–23 at 140 and 6.312–1 at 139.

11  See Rosa anglica sev Rosa medicinæ Johannis Anglici, ed. and trans. Winifred Wulff, Irish Texts Society Publications, 25 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1929).

12  H. P. Cholmeley, John of Gaddesden and the Rosa medicinae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 22. 13  Gaddesden, Rosa anglica, fol. 65r. 14  Gaddesden, Rosa anglica, fol. 65r.

15  AW, 2.953–54 at 44. Translation is from Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), here 44. 16  Luke DeMaitre, Medieval Medicine: The Art of Healing, from Head to Toe, Praeger Series on the Middle Ages (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013), 127–29.

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Galen’s theory states that the faculty of motion is more greatly affected than that of sensation. In one case, the effects of stupor on these two faculties depend on the gravity of the injury to the nerves: “tunc si nocumentum est magnum leditur sensus et motus. Si parvum, manet sensus et non manet motus” (if the injury is great, sense and motion are struck. If small, sense remains and motion does not remain).17 This is “quia maior virtus requiritur ad motum quam ad sensum” (because greater power is required by motion than by sense).18 According to Galen’s theory, a stupefied patient would lack motion but retain sense perception; they may appear insensate but still experience sensation, similar to Paul’s continued ability to hear the voice of God while temporarily unable to move or see. Avicenna, who cites and modifies Galen’s own theories in his Canon of Medicine, describes stupor as an organic disease, morbus officialis, that is, a disease which affects a particular body part or organ. The strength and health of the affected body part will determine the intensity of the manifestation of illness: Sed proprie stupor dicit Avicenna est morbus officialis faciens evenire in sensu tactus nocumentum aut defectionem aut diminutionem cum tremore si est debilis aut mollitie[m] si est confirmatus. But, Avicenna says, stupor is properly an organic disease. Stupor causes damage, deficiency, or lessening with tremor in the sense of touch, if [the part] is weak; or weakness, if [the part] is strong.19

Stupor affects touch primarily by preventing the unrestricted movement of the sensory power, thus reducing or preventing one’s ability to perceive through the external senses; however, Avicenna acknowledges that the faculty of motion may also be affected “quia virtus sensibilis non solum prohibetur a penetratione sed virtus motiva” (because not only is the sensible power prevented from flowing [lit. penetrating], but so too is the motive power).20 Therefore, according to Avicenna, stupor affects not only a body’s movement but also sensory perception, which is useful in explaining the dual sensory and motor impairments of both medical stupor and religious ecstasy.

Conclusion

In Gaddesden’s initial description of stupor, he remarks that the condition is characterized by the decreasing of both sense and motion, specifically the sense of touch. In this definition, Gaddesden reconciles his two authorities: Avicenna, who writes that sensation, especially touch, is affected more than motion; and Galen, who writes that motion is affected more than sensation, though both can be affected. In 17  Gaddesden, Rosa anglica, fol. 65r. 18  Gaddesden, Rosa anglica, fol. 65r. 19  Gaddesden, Rosa anglica, fol. 65r. 20  Gaddesden, Rosa anglica, fol. 65r.



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other medical texts that Gaddesden cites elsewhere in the Rosa,21 such as Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicinae (ca. 1305), stupor is described in greater detail, often as a separate malady. This present case study of Gaddesden’s relatively scant focus on stupor in its relation to paralysis may indicate a growing understanding of stupor as a symptom of impairment rather than a distinct illness. Furthermore, medieval medical discourse contributes to our understandings of narratives about or by medieval anchorites like Christina of Markyate (1096/98–ca. 1155) and Julian of Norwich which reveal more complex accounts of physical and spiritual experience through an awareness of the medieval medical discourse surrounding stupor. Nevertheless, stupor’s effects on the body’s faculties of sensation and movement inform religious descriptions of unexplainable spiritual phenomena, particularly modes of ecstatic experience.

21  Cholmeley, John of Gaddesden, 166–84.

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Laura Godfrey received her PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut. Her research explores the intersections of literature, religion, and medicine in medieval England. Her work has been funded in part by an Ahmanson Research Fellowship at UCLA and a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

THE MATERIAL OF VERNACULAR ENGLISH DEVOTION: TEMPTATION AND SWEETNESS IN ANCRENE WISSE AND RICHARD ROLLE’S FORM OF LIVING JENNIFER N. BROWN

While many important

theological texts in the Middle Ages were translated into English, Latin remained the language of devotional authority. Translators in prologues and epilogues were careful to apologize for their inability to get the move from Latin to English just right, or were quick to point out that they had made sure to drop the heavily theological content so that the less lettered could understand what they were about to read. The unknown “Englisshe compyloure” (English compiler) of the late Middle English collection of women’s saints’ lives in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114 does just this, writing that he hopes those who read it “forgif hym alle defautes that he hath made in compilynge […] this Englysche so as is oute of Latyne” (forgive him all errors that he has made in compiling […] this English thus as [it] is from Latin).1 The English translation is hence the inferior byproduct of the original. The underlying assumption is that the Latin is the language of learning and theological understanding, the English the language for the masses, for the more simple reader. However, as Middle English devotional literature develops its own vocabulary and compositions separate from the translated text, there is a subtle shift in how the language is received and what it means to read in English. One of the more interesting places that this shift manifests itself is in the massive Latin compilation known as the Speculum spiritualium (The Spiritual Mirror, ca. 1400–30), which, despite clearly being written for the Latin-literate, deliberately contained some English text within it. This compilation, which in manuscript form Ian Doyle notes “occupies 208 leaves of large quarto format in double columns,” with approximately “315,000 words divided into seven parts,”2 was most likely Carthusian and contains pieces from several devotional texts—from usual suspects (Walter Hilton, ca. 1340/45–1396, for example) and also unusual ones (such as the text that will become the basis for Disce mori (Learn to Die), fifteenth century).3 While the vast 1  Transcription and translation my own.

2  A. I. Doyle, “The Speculum spiritualium from Manuscript to Print,” Journal of the Early Book Society 11 (2008): 145–53 at 145.

3  Doyle, “The Speculum spiritualium,” 146, lists the following named sources, citing E. A. Jones: “Richard Rolle expressly (De emendatione vite), Walter Hilton both by name and not (De utilitate religionis, De ymagine peccati, and Scala perfectionis), St. Birgitta of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena’s revelations, William Flete (De remediis temptationum) and Henry Suso’s Horologium sapientie anonymously, and a treatise on pusillanimity elsewhere wrongly attributed to Jean Gerson.”

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majority of these texts are in Latin, there are three small excerpts in English: two poems (“Ihesu that art heven kyng” and “Mary thou were greet with loveli cheere”) and an excerpt from Richard Rolle’s Form of Living (ca. 1348; Rolle, ca. 1300–1349). It would seem to me to make sense not to translate a poem, dependent on rhyme and thus easier to keep in its original vernacular, but the Form of Living could certainly be translated (and indeed, it has its own manuscript tradition in Latin).4 Even when the Speculum spirtualium moves from manuscript form into a hefty printed version in 1510—printed in Paris, not in England, with a continental devotional market in mind—the Rolle remains in English, although it says in the surviving manuscripts (but not the printed edition) that the excerpt is in English because it sounds better that way.5 In this brief essay, I would like to look at two texts as case studies that reflect the way anchoritic themes forged in early medieval England will recur in new forms in later English (and ultimately continental texts). Here, I look at what is unique about Rolle’s use of the English language, which may prompt this linguistic preservation in the Speculum spiritualium. I suggest that he is drawing on a particular affectivity and materiality associated with English devotion, first clearly seen in Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses, thirteenth century), a text Rolle certainly knew in some form, and seen in its later and altered form through Rolle. When Rolle draws on Ancrene Wisse, a text and tradition that has been shown to resurface in English vernacular devotional texts again and again and thus is interpolated into the very fabric of medieval devotional life, he is also subverting this language, a language no doubt familiar to its audience, one that resonates with and gestures toward piety and reflection. In this way, and through his use of words and images, he draws his readers’ attentions to a tradition that they know and understand—the tradition exemplified in Ancrene Wisse (although not begun there). By shifting its focus, and with it, the focus of the reader, Rolle is rearticulating English medieval devotion in a way that is both familiar and also new. In the Form of Living, Rolle consciously enters into a tradition of auctoritas. He is concerned with the very materiality of the body, the needs it must satisfy, and those which can be denied. The sections of the Form included in the Speculum spiritualium are ones that Rolle himself must have translated from Latin: “For saynt Jerome says þat he makys of ravyn offerand, þat outragely tourmentis his body in ovre lytel mete or slepe. And saynt Bernarde sais: ‘Fastyng and wakyng lettis noght gastly godes, bot helpes, if þai be done with discrecion; withouten þat, þei er vices’” (Saint Jerome says that a man who torments his body violently with too little food or sleep is making an offering of something which has been pillaged. And Saint Bernard says: ‘Fasting and doing without sleep do not hinder spiritual actions but assist them, so long as they are done with discretion; without that they are vices’).6 In the 4  This translation survives in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 140/80. 5  Doyle, “The Speculum spiritualium,” 145.

6  Speculum spiritualium, fol. 52r in the 1510 printed version (Paris), which can be found online through GoogleBooks. English translations of the Form of Living are from Richard Rolle: The English

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Speculum, these direct rules are contextualized within a longer passage about eating, fasting, sleep, and the importance of tempered asceticism (extreme measures would weaken one too much to fight off the fiend and his machinations). This part is excerpted from chapter one of the Form of Living, and the remainder of the excerpt comes from chapters five and six. Throughout the Form, Rolle returns to questions about abstinence and its implications and effects. These words, written in the Form for Margaret Kirkby (ca. 1322–1391/94), an anchoress that he knew in Yorkshire, have a new audience in the Speculum spiritualium, which is certainly monastic at its core and likely no longer female given that the vast majority of the tome is in Latin. Rolle warns his readers to not give into “ovre mikel abstinence” (too much abstinence) because if it leads you near death (where one is “redy to gyf þe gast,” or ready to die) then the reader has ultimately “synned in þat dede” (sinned in undertaking that deed).7 These warnings and this language are not unheard of in devotional texts; indeed, they frequently appear alongside hagiographies and other exempla concerned with a reader who will try to imitate a saintly asceticism. However, it is out of place here amongst the more mystical texts of the Speculum spiritualium to focus on some of the practical matters of food, fasting, and sleep. More curious is that this is the excerpt from Rolle that the translator/compiler chooses to keep in English rather than translating. There is nothing here that I would mark as particularly “Rollean” like we find in other parts of the Form of Living. Instead, the focus of the excerpt is very much on approaching asceticism with measure, “For if þou have broken it with ovre mikel abstynence, the es reft appetyte of mete, and oft sal þou be in qwathes,8 also þou war redy to gyf þe gast; and wit þou wele, þou synned in þat dede” (the reason is that if you are going to have ruined it with over-great abstinence, your appetite for food will be taken away and you will keep collapsing in fainting-fits as if you were on the verge of expiring; and be very sure of this, that action would have been a sin), he warns.9 The sin of the body that Rolle is concerned with is different than the usual sin of the body associated with sexual sin, or gluttony, or other ways in which the fleshly desires can lead one into temptation. Instead, Rolle is focusing on the sin of the pious—or a particular kind of false piety rooted in the deadliest of sins, pride. He is still focused on the materiality of the body, but here he is looking at how to both deny and sustain the body together. Abstinence, yes. Just not too much. What about these words, this English vocabulary, this message on the body, resonates for its readers in a way that a Latin translation of the text may not? It may be that the language here clearly reflects a thread we can trace through vernacular devotional literature in England, starting with Ancrene Wisse which is prolific and Writings, trans. Rosamund S. Allen (New York: Paulist, 1988), 155–56. 7  Speculum spiritualium, fol. 52r. Translations here my own.

8  Rosamund Allen defines “qwathes” as spasms in her glossary for English Writings of Richard Rolle Hermit of Hampole, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 175. 9  Speculum spiritualium, fol. 52r; Richard Rolle, trans. Allen, 168.

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explicit in its language about sinning, temptation, and asceticism. The English tradition, not exactly starting with but often located in Ancrene Wisse, early defines a sensory, affective language exemplifying how the material world can be experienced through the body. The author writes to his “leove sustren,” or dear sisters, that there are two kinds of rules—“Þe an riwleð þe heorte,” one rules the heart, and the other how one should “beoren him wiðuten,” govern their behaviour. 10 It is in the rule of the heart where contemplation lies. But both the inner and the outer self are subject to temptation, and no complex treatise on meditation avoids discussing this stumbling block to God. Ancrene Wisse has an extensive chapter devoted to the subject of temptation, utilizing metaphors we will see again in medieval devotional works. God tests his love “as þe goltsmið fondeð þet gold i þe fure” (like a goldsmith tests gold in the fire), with the false gold burning and the true gold shining brighter.11 The sisters are towers who need to protect themselves from attack,12 a military metaphor that seems perhaps inappropriate for a group of female recluses, and, most alarming, if the anchoress does not feel under attack by the “helle weorrur” (hell warrior), it is likely because she is already “biwunnen” (conquered) by him and firmly “in his hond.”13 The anchoresses must defend themselves from the devil’s weapons,14 but are helpless if they have already given entry. The writer then councils his sisters to reflect on the sins they have committed and reject them through contemplation. He writes that they should not only be saying “hali meditatiuns” (pious meditations),15 which include those on the Lord, his works, his words, and the saints, but should also contemplate “oþer þohtes” (other thoughts) that would repel the fiend: “dredfule, wunderfule, gleadfule, ant sorhfule” (frightening, astounding, cheering, and distressing) ones.16 Where Rolle sees danger in too much fasting and ascetic practice, Ancrene Wisse counsels it as an appropriate weapon against the Devil and his snares: Ne grapi hire nan to softeliche, hire seoluen to bichearren. Ne schal ha for hire lif witen hire al cleane, ne halden riht hire chastete, wiðuten twa þinges, as Seint Ailred þe abbat wrat to his suster. Þet an is pinsunge i flesch wið feasten, wið wecchen, wið disceplines, wið heard werunge, heard leohe, wið uuel, wið muchele swinkes.

10  Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Preface, lines 13 and 28, at vol. 1, p. 1 (hereafter AW). Translation from Ancrene Wisse, Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), 1 (hereafter Guide). 11  AW, 4.61–62 at 69; Guide, 69.

12  AW, 4.696–704 at 86–87.

13  AW, 4.707–10 at 87; Guide, 87.

14  AW, 4.1405–408 at 111; Guide, 111. 15  AW, 4.899 at 92; Guide, 92.

16  AW, 4.899–904 at 92; Guide, 92.

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No-one should be too soft on herself, so that she deceives herself. She will not keep herself completely pure for life, or maintain her chastity properly, without two things, as St. Ælred the abbot wrote to his sister. One is mortification of the flesh by fasting, by vigils, by scourgings, by coarse clothing, hard beds, by illness, by heavy labor.17

Just as Rolle draws on this language of asceticism, he inverts it. Where the author of Ancrene Wisse advises fasting, waking, and pain, Rolle notes that it, too, can be a vice, a temptation. In this way he plays with the traditional vocabulary of devotion. Ancrene Wisse also describes the temptations of the flesh as those that invite “swetnesse, eise, ant softnesse” (sweetness, ease, and softness),18 pleasures that make the body ready to betray the soul at every turn. The interplay of outside/ inside, bitter/sweet pervades Ancrene Wisse—the sweetness on the inside is contained by an asceticism on the outside, but a sweetness on the outside, the fleshly sweetness, betrays the rot within. Rolle, similarly, characterizes one of the great bodily temptations as “sweetness,” warning against “fleschly desyres: for þai have na will ne myghte to stand, þai fall in lustes and lykynges of þis worlde; and for þai thynk þam swete, þai dwell in þam styll, many tyll þaire lyves ende” (bodily desires […] Because they have no willpower nor strength for resistance, they are replete with the pleasures and inclinations of this world, and because these seem sweet to them, they remain in them all the time, many to the end of their lives).19 The “sweetness” of the flesh is a temptation of the devil, and reflects this linguistic tradition, while also invoking other sensory pleasures—sweetness of food, is of course, a gluttony; sweetness of fleshly desires gestures towards something sexual; sweetness can also be a pleasant aroma (according to the Middle English Dictionary20). So now we have three of five senses represented here, and what is fleshly temptation if not a sensual one? But Rolle has played a bit of a trick on his reader here, because he inverts that sweetness and reforms that term in relationship to God. You can see this rhetorical move with sweetness in chapter two, where he urges the reader to turn to Christ “and þe swetnes of his love, with þe fire of þe Haly Gast, þat purges all syn, sall be in þe and with þe, ledand þe and lerand þe how þou sall thynk, how þou sall pray, what þou sall wyrk” (and the sweetness of his love, with the fire of the Holy Spirit who cleanses all sin, shall be in you and with you, leading you and instructing you how you are to meditate, how you are to pray, and what you are to do).21 This part of the Form of Living is not excerpted in the Speculum spiritualium, but it shows how Rolle rhetorically draws on and plays with a traditional vocabulary of medieval devotion in a way that refocuses its gaze. For instance, unlike Ancrene Wisse which argues 17  AW, 6.283–87 at 139; Guide, 139. 18  AW, 4.225 at 74; Guide, 74.

19  English Writings, ed. Allen, 85; Richard Rolle, trans. Allen, 154.

20  See “swetenes(se), n.,” def. 2, in Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan): https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. 21  English Writings, ed. Allen, 89; Richard Rolle, trans. Allen, 157.

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that God tests his love in a fire (as quoted above), here the fire is the Holy Ghost— not a test of truth or falseness, but a fire that purges sin. A fire that will show the penitent how to think, pray, and labour, not one that requires an ascetic practice of prayer, fasting, and physical discipline. Here, the sweetness is not the sweetness of the flesh leading the sisters into sin, but rather the sweetness of God’s love, enveloping the sinner. In Rolle’s hands, fire is not punitive, and sweetness is not a failure of the flesh. Thoughts repel the fiend but are also directed to and orchestrated by God. Indeed, prayer and meditation are easier here, and he ends by directing Margaret to allow this fire of love to lead her to contemplation: “And þan þe fire of lufe verrali ligges in þair hert and byrnes þarin, and makes clene of al erthly filth. And sithen forward þai er contemplatife men, and ravyst in lufe. For contemplation es a syght, and þai se intil heeven with þar gastly egh” (And then the fire of love is really ablaze in their heart, burning there, making it cleansed of all earthly contamination; and from that time onward they are contemplatives, enraptured in love, because contemplation is a vision, and they gaze inside heaven with their spiritual eye).22 Again, Rolle reminds the reader that the burning is not the burning of lust or the burning of hellfires (all evoked with the word), but the burning of love. A love that leads the reader to contemplative prayer—a far different prescription than Ancrene Wisse, which ends not with contemplation, but with a reflection on the outer rule, bringing the reader back to her body and the rules that govern it. The “eye” mentioned here is the man’s eye, to which the anchoress has opened herself (and presumably to sin, with it), not the “ghostly eye” Rolle suggests, moving the outer body cast on the material world to the inner, affective soul.

Conclusion

Looking at Ancrene Wisse and Rolle’s Form of Living as bookends to foundational English medieval devotion, we can see how the materiality of the body is always at its centre, the senses of seeing, feeling, and tasting the metaphoric tools at both authors’ disposal to express the sins of the world and the salvific balm of God. As foundational as these writers are for other devotional texts, we can likely trace outward and between as to how the materiality of the body and the substance of the soul are expressed in the same terms for the devotional reader, but also how they are subtly changed. The “sweetness” of one is not the “sweetness” of the other, challenging the medieval devotional reader to pivot within what they know and understand and demonstrating that, even with a shared vocabulary, the meaning is not static.

22  English Writings, ed. Allen, 119; Richard Rolle, trans. Allen, 182–83.

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Jennifer N. Brown is Chair of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Marymount Manhattan College, where she is also Professor of English and World Literatures. Her most recent book is Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2018), and she has a volume co-edited with Nicole Rice, Manuscript Culture and Medieval Devotional Traditions: Essays in Honour of Michael G. Sargent (2021).

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF AN ANCHORITE CELL AT RUYTON, SHROPSHIRE VICTORIA YUSKAITIS

The few examples

of current archaeological research evaluating anchorite cells focus on squints, the most common surviving feature in English parish churches.1 Squints are small windows usually cut into the chancel that allow an anchorite to view the Eucharist—an essential devotional aspect of the vocation.2 The thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) indicated a cell should have three windows, including a squint, and that these windows should be blocked with a curtain or shutter when not in use to prevent worldly temptations.3 My analysis builds on this research and emphasizes archaeological context. Archaeological features must be interpreted in relation to other features or artifacts—without this context, interpretation is fragmentary.4 Interpreting squints within their full context offers new perspectives of the lived experience of anchorites, as illustrated by the surviving features at St. John the Baptist in the settlement of Ruyton-XI-Towns in the Welsh Marches of England.5 David Cranage’s 1912 account provides a particularly detailed archaeological description of the Ruyton cell.6 The cell’s anchoritic archaeology was also briefly compared to other anchorite squints in 1909, 1938, and 1965, demonstrating that it was well known and that Cranage’s interpretation of the features as anchoritic

1  Roberta Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 183–93; Michelle M. Sauer, “Architecture of Desire: Mediating the Female Gaze in the Medieval English Anchorhold,” Gender and History 25 (2013): 545–64; and Eddie A. Jones, Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 47–49 and 92–94. 2  Sauer, “Architecture,” 552; Gilchrist, Contemplation, 185.

3  Gilchrist, Contemplation, 184. See Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 325–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1.15 at vol. 1, p. 7, where the Ancrene Wisse author assumes the existence of the church window, or squint, through which the anchoress can view the Eucharist above the “hehe weoued” (high altar). In addition to the house window for exchanges with servants; in Part 2 (2.20–22 at 20), he mentions that the parlour window, which allowed for interactions with visitors, should be the smallest, and all windows should be covered with a black curtain of double thickness. 4  John Moreland, Archaeology and Text (London: Duckworth, 2003), 82.

5  Ruyton-XI-Towns, or Ruyton-of (or -in)-the-Eleven Towns, refers to the merging of eleven townships under one manor in the twelfth century. See Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Shropshire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 237; and David Herbert Somerset Cranage, An Architectural Account of the Churches of Shropshire, 2 vols. (Wellington: Hobson, 1901 and 1912), 2:819. 6  Cranage, An Architectural Account, 820.

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Figure 10.1. The anchorite squint at Ruyton. © Victoria Yuskaitis.

Figure 10.2. The external recess at Ruyton. © Victoria Yuskaitis.



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was accepted.7 In 2012, Mari Hughes-Edwards also interpreted the features as anchoritic, while the current church pamphlet describes the cell as “a hermit’s chamber.”8 These sources focused on two features: a square blocked-in squint measuring 27.5 cm × 27 cm, placed in the internal north wall of the chancel, and an external filled-in arched recess enveloping the squint (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2). In isolation, the squint and recess cannot provide more complex interpretation. However, evaluating these features within their archaeological context demonstrates how the construction of this particular cell and its connection to this individual church influenced anchoritic lived experience. Internal and external features offer key information about how the medieval church differed from the modern building, and they provide a sense of how the anchorite would have interacted with the rest of the church building—and, by extension, the church community—through the cell. The square squint, placed 92.5 cm from the floor level, is typical of an anchorite cell: the aperture is splayed, it is small and simple in design, and it opens into the chancel, close to the altar. A modern wooden shutter has been fastened to the squint, hiding the rough fill behind. The splaying of the internal top and sides of the squint is unique, unlike the nearby un-splayed aumbries; comparison with other anchorite squints shows that this is a key and distinct characteristic. The squint recess is another indicator common to anchorite cells—a recess of a similar style can be seen at Compton, Surrey. The recess looks short because a raised burial vault has been added externally in front of it. These features indicate anchoritic activity, even though no medieval written record survives, showing how archaeological analysis articulates the lived experience of anchorites, even those who have disappeared from the literary record over time. Archaeological evidence demonstrates a chancel extension, indicating that the cell would have been closer to the medieval altar than the current altar placement suggests. Externally, a vertical line on the north wall extending 42 cm from the ground level divides the easternmost part of the chancel (Figure 10.3). This break in the stonework indicates an extension, showing that the easternmost part of the chancel, measuring two metres from the dividing line to the buttress, is a later addition to the original chancel. An abrupt change is also signalled by the external string coursing around the windows, which stops at this line. Internally, a rudimentary pre-extension piscina is placed directly opposite the squint in the south wall (Figure 10.4). A lintel stone shapes the pointed arch, and the rectangular piscina mea-

7  Henrietta M. Auden, “Shropshire Hermits and Anchorites,” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological & Historical Society 9 (1909): 97–112 at 100; A. J. Walker, Staplehurst Church (Cranbrook: Eagle, 1938), 13; and Philip Boughton Chatwin, Squints in Warwickshire Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 13.

8  Mari Hughes-Edwards, “Solitude and Sociability: The World of the Medieval Anchorite,” in Historic Churches 2012, https://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/anchorites/anchorites. htm, accessed October 24, 2019; Diocese of Lichfield Deanery of Ellesmere, Guide and Short History: St. John the Baptist Parish Church Ruyton XI Towns, Shropshire (Ruyton: The Parochial Church Council, 2010; rev. ed. 2015), “The Chancel.”

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sures only 24 cm × 32 cm, and 91 cm from the floor level. It has been blocked by a single, large, loose-fitting stone. Cranage explicitly stated the opening was a niche and not a piscina, but the clear view afforded to the anchorite, the close proximity to the medieval altar between both features inside of the modern communion rail, and the lintel stone suggest intentional piscina design.9 The original piscina is only 107 cm away from a larger piscina to the east. The larger piscina and nearby sedilia are contemporary with the chancel extension, when the cell and early piscina became obsolete. The cell, then, is a later insertion into a Norman build, and would have been in use before the chancel extension, which was probably completed in Figure 10.3. The dividing line indicating a the thirteenth century.10 chancel extension at Ruyton. Archaeology also indicates © Victoria Yuskaitis. the cell’s size and shape. Cranage described how an old wall extending from the north wall of the chancel was used to build the L-shaped burial vault foundation (Figure 10.5).11 The longest extension of the vault lines up with the chancel extension. Before the extension, the outer wall of the anchorite cell reached from the end of the chancel, continuing at least 3 m 8 cm into the churchyard (the furthest extent of the vault from the chancel wall). The squint and recess are between two Norman-style windows, and closest to the easternmost window. This awkward placement could block the window, showing that these features were later additions. This evidence suggests that a stone-built cell approximately 2.6 m wide (measured from the vertical line to the edge of the window) provided living space, and a smaller chamber extending from this main cell underneath the window enclosed the squint and recess, providing access to the anchorite and keeping the window unblocked. The closeness of the squint to the early medieval altar and piscina is striking. Even while physically separated from the church community, the anchorite would have shared the experience of the Eucharist. Other squints, such as the one placed in the tower wall at Chester-leStreet, County Durham, are placed farther from the chancel. 9  Cranage, An Architectural Account, 819–20.

10  Cranage, An Architectural Account, 819; Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Shropshire, 237–38. 11  Cranage, An Architectural Account, 820.



The Archaeological Context of an Anchorite Cell at Ruyton, Shropshire

Figure 10.4. The blocked-in early piscina directly across from the squint. © Victoria Yuskaitis.

Figure 10.5. The L-shaped raised vault, following the line of the chancel extension. © Victoria Yuskaitis.

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Conclusion

Even this brief discussion of a single case study shows the value of a methodology stressing archaeological context: not only does the cell at Ruyton indicate a glimpse of medieval lived experience at this particular site, but it also provides essential data missing from the literary record. Although Cranage described aspects of the anchoritic archaeology, he failed to articulate an interpretation of the cell’s design, and later research remained cursory.12 Archaeological context shows how the needs of specific church communities and architecture of particular churches influenced the design of anchorite cells—for instance, the cell at Ruyton had to be constructed around the Norman windows, and the close proximity of the squint to the altar was emphasized. My research on other anchorite cells in Shropshire and throughout England shows great diversity in squint and cell design, placement, and style, and raises new questions about the lived experience of individual anchorites at these sites. Victoria Yuskaitis completed her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. She is currently a Public Engagement Officer at the University of Central Lancashire and has a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Her research focuses on English anchorites, the cells in which they lived, and their varied experiences through an interdisciplinary lens that combines historical, literary, and archaeological approaches with diverse source materials.

12  Cranage’s ambivalence about the cell’s construction is related to his interpretations of other archaeological features with which I also disagree but lack the room to engage here.

INDEX

Abbo of Fleury, 74, 82, 112 Passio S. Eadmundi (The Passion of St. Edmund), 74, 82 Ælred of Rievaulx (1110/12–1167), 7, 10–11, 48, 59–60, 64, 66, 87, 89–90, 93, 102, 125 De Institutione Inclusarum (Rule for a Recluse), 7, 10–11, 48, 59–60, 64, 66, 87, 89–90, 93, 102 Alan of Lille, 44 Ambrose, bishop of Milan, 55 anchorhold, 12–13, 29, 48, 51–54, 57–58, 61, 66–69, 71, 77, 87, 97, 99, 105, 107, 129 anchorite or anchoress, 6–14, 20, 29, 33–35, 37–39, 44–46, 48–49, 51–67, 69, 71–74, 76-78, 80, 82, 84, 87–94, 96–106, 108, 115–17, 119, 122–24, 126, 129–34 Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), 5, 7–12, 14, 20, 33–34, 38, 44, 46, 48, 52, 58, 60–62, 65, 71–73, 78, 87–90, 92–94, 96–98, 102, 105–7, 116–17, 121–26, 129 archaeology and archaeological context, 1–2, 8–9, 101, 129–34 artifact(s), 2, 14, 19, 34–36, 46, 51, 53–54, 129 Augustine, 110 Averroes, 116 Avicenna, 115–18

Baldwin, abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, 73–74 Bede, Historia ecclesia (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), 41 Bernard of Clairvaux, 12, 88–89, 92–98, 122 Bernard of Gordon, 116, 119 Lilium medicinae, 119 Biblical verses (in Vulgate order): Genesis 3:1–4, 89 Genesis 39:7–13, 27 Joshua 3:4, 75

1 Samuel 1:10, 110 Psalm 6:8, 110 Psalm 23:3–4, 79 Psalm 39:12, 110 Song of Solomon 1:2, 77–78 Ecclesiasticus 43:1–5, 1 Isaiah 29:4, 37 Matthew 20:16, 79 Mark 12:41–44, 79 Luke 1:26–38, 89, 94 Luke 1:34–55, 94 Luke 1:40–41, 96 Luke 2:48, 94, 96 John 2:3–5, 94, 96 John 20:17, 72 Acts 9:6, 115 1 Corinthians 1:19, 37 1 Corinthians 11:7–10, 20 Ephesians 6:10–18, 106 Hebrews 11:13, 109 Revelation 14:3, 77 Birgitta of Sweden, Revelationes coelestes (Celestial revelations), 63, 121 body and bodies, 2–3, 5, 8, 11–13, 19–30, 33, 35–36, 38–45, 49–55, 57–58, 60–61, 64–67, 69–72, 74, 76, 78, 80–81, 84, 88–89, 95, 101, 103–8, 111–14, 115–19, 122–26

cell, 7–9, 11, 38–39, 41, 48, 51, 53, 56–59, 61, 66–67, 69, 73, 77, 82, 88, 101, 104–7, 111–12, 129, 131–32, 134 The Chastising of God’s Children, 63 Christina of Markyate, 11–12, 17–20, 24–30, 119 cloth, clothes, and clothing, 8, 11–12, 17–30, 53, 64, 74–76, 125 Disce Mori (Learn to Die), 121 discourse, 5–6, 10, 13, 17, 23, 27, 53–55, 69, 73, 90, 94, 115–17, 119 Dublin Rule, 14

136

Index

embodiment, embodied, 3, 5, 8–9, 11, 14, 51, 84, 89, 97–98, 101, 103–4, 112, 114 Eve, 89–92, 97–98 Eve of Wilton, 10, 76–77, 79, 84, 93, 102–14 flesh and fleshly, 9, 12, 20, 25, 33, 36, 38–39, 41, 59, 64–65, 71, 74, 78, 80, 83, 105, 123, 125–26 French (and Anglo-Norman), 5, 7, 9, 11, 17–19, 25, 45, 80, 88

Galen, 37, 115–18 gem(stone)(s), 27, 30, 56, 59–61, 65 Geoffrey, abbot of St. Albans, 29 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, 10–11, 13–14, 73–84, 93, 101–14 Liber Confortatorius (Book of Consolation), 10–11, 76–84, 93, 101–14 Miracles of St. Edmund, 11, 14, 73–84 Gregory the Great, 44 Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lincoln, 1, 26

hagiography, hagiographies, and hagiographical (see also Saints, listed by name), 7, 10–12, 14, 17, 19, 23–24, 30, 33, 36, 52–53, 62, 69, 74, 77–78, 81, 85, 123 Henry III, King of England, 57 Herman, archdeacon of Bury St. Edmunds, 75 –76, 78–79, 81–83 Hermann, bishop of Ramsbury in Wiltshire, 10, 102 hermit, 2, 6–7, 12, 14, 29, 60, 73, 82, 123, 129, 131 Hildebert of Lavardin, 18, 96 Hilton, Walter, 91, 121 Hippocrates, 116–17 Idung of Prüfening, 64–65 imitatio, (Christae, clericae, Mariae), 12, 40, 89–90, 92, 97 James of Voragine, Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), 45, 62 Jan van Ruusbroec, 13, 62–63 De calculo (The Sparkling Stone), 13, 62

Die Geestelike Brulocht (The Spiritual Espousals), 63 Jesus, 44–45, 55, 61–64, 66–67, 72, 77, 96 Christ 4, 8, 13, 17, 24, 27–30, 35, 40, 43–44, 49, 54, 56–57, 59, 61–65, 67, 71–72, 77–79, 83–84, 105–6, 108, 115–16, 125 John of Gaddesden, Rosa medicinae (Rose of medicine), 13, 115–19 Julian of Norwich, 6, 48, 56, 63, 69, 115, 119 Shewings to an Anchoress, 63, 69 Katherine Group, 7, 9–12, 14, 33–40, 44, 46–49, 62, 72 Hali Meiðhad (Holy Maidenhood), 33, 44 Iuliene (The Life of St. Juliana), 11, 33, 36, 47 Katerine (The Life of St. Katherine), 11, 33, 36–38, 42, 48–49 Margarete (The Life of St. Margaret), 11, 33, 35–36, 38–45, 48 Sawles Warde (Custody of the Soul), 33 Kirkby, Margaret, 12, 123, 126

Lapidaries, 13, 60, 62 Peterborough Lapidary, 60, 62 Sloane Lapidary, 60 Latin, 5, 7–12, 18, 37, 39–41, 47, 52, 55, 59, 62–63, 66, 73, 101, 115–17, 121–23 Laȝamon, Brut, 41 Life of Christina of Markyate, 11–12, 17–20, 24–30 manuscripts: Amherst Manuscript (London, British Library, MS Additional 37790), 63 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, 57 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 303, 42 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 140/80, 122 London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. xiv, 33 London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. iii, 42 London, British Library, Cotton MS Titus D. xviii, 34, 47



London, British Library, Harley MS 2801, 39 London, British Library, Harley MS 5327, 39 London, British Library, Royal MS 17 A. xxvii, 34, 37, 45, 47, 49 London, British Library, MS Sloane 3103, 101 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 34, 33, 34, 37, 47–49 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 423, 59 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114, 121 Vernon Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1), 59 Margery Kempe, 48, 69 Marguerite Poréte, Le Mirouer des simples âmes (Mirror of Simple Souls), 63 Mary, the Virgin, 21, 22, 26, 28, 66, 87–99, 109 materiality, 1–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 21, 24–25, 30, 35, 51, 55, 61, 72–73, 88, 122–23, 126 Matthew Paris, 57 Middle English, 1,7, 9–12, 14, 33–42, 44–47, 49, 51–52, 61, 63, 66, 72–73, 76, 80, 84, 87, 92, 95, 101, 103, 108, 112, 115–17, 121, 125 mystic, mystical, and mysticism, 1, 3, 5, 10, 12–13, 56, 62, 78, 123 object(s), 1–6, 8, 11, 13–14, 19, 21, 25–27, 38, 42, 51–52, 54, 58, 60–61, 66, 74, 110, 115

Paul the Deacon, 17–18 Life of Mary of Egypt, 11–12, 17–24 Paulinus of Nola, 55, 64 Pearl, 61, 103 pilgrim(s) and pilgrimage, 21–22, 53, 55, 57, 66–67, 69, 74–75 prayer(s), 3–5, 8–12, 21–22, 30–31, 33–34, 39, 41–42, 45, 47, 56, 58, 65–67, 69, 75, 82, 84, 92–93, 98, 101–14, 126

Ranulph, bishop of Durham, 25–26, 28 recluse(s), reclusive, and reclusion, 1–2, 6–15, 17–24, 29–30, 39, 48, 56, 59, 61, 63–66, 73, 76–77, 79, 82–83, 87, 93, 96, 101–3, 109, 112–13, 124 relic(s), 3, 8, 13–14, 29, 33, 35, 38, 40–44, 46, 49, 51–69, 71–84, 95, 112, 115

Index

137

reliquary, 13, 42, 53–54, 57, 59–64, 66–69, 79 Robert of Nantes, patriarch of Jerusalem, 57 Rolle, Richard, 10–12, 60, 63, 122–26 Incendium Amoris (The Fire of Love), 12, 60 Form of Living, 10–12, 122–26 Rule of St. Benedict, 41, 105 Saints, alphabetically by name: Antony, 7 Cuthbert 7 Edith, 79 Edmund, 11, 13, 73–84, 112 Elizabeth of Hungary, 62 Felix, 55, 64 Guthlac, 7, 56 Juliana of Nicomedia (see Katherine Group), 33, 36 Katherine of Alexandria (see Katherine Group), 33, 36–38, 49 Margaret of Antioch (see Katherine Group), 33, 35–36, 39–46, 62 Mary of Egypt (see Paul the Deacon), 11–12, 17–24 Mary Magdalene, 72, 83–84, 89 Paul, 20, 91, 108, 115–16, 118 Polycarp, 56 Seitha, recluse, 14, 73–84 sense(s) and sensory, 6–8, 11, 13–14, 33, 35, 44, 53, 69, 71–74, 76, 78, 81, 84, 115, 117–18, 125–26 sermon(s), 10, 37–38, 43–44, 62, 88–89, 92–95, 98 Sophronius, 18 South English Legendary, 115 Speculum Spiritualium (The Spiritual Mirror), 10, 121–26 squint, 66–67, 101, 129–34 stone, 2–4, 13, 24, 51–52, 56, 60–63, 65, 131–32 touch, 8, 11, 13–14, 33, 35, 40, 42, 44–45, 60, 67, 71–74, 76, 78–79, 81, 83–84, 108, 117–18

vernacular, 7, 9–12, 33–34, 38–39, 41, 47, 49, 121–26 virgin(s), virginal, and virginity, 11–12, 19–20, 27, 33, 35, 59, 62, 64–65, 69, 74, 77–80, 83, 95–96

138

Index

voice, 5, 8, 17, 41, 45, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94–95, 98, 111, 118

Wooing Group, the, 7, 33–34, 47 On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi (A Good Prayer to Our Lady), 33 Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd (The Wooing of Our Lord), 7 wound, 62, 71–72, 83